tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588Wed, 16 Aug 2017 16:08:08 +0000MusicAncient GreeceEarly civilisationVenezuelaOrigins of artPaleolithic artLiteratureSymbolic representationHuman natureIntroductionNeolithic artWomenCinemaEgyptian RevolutionFascismFilmLanguageMIA transcriptionsBase and superstructureBibliographyDialectical materialismEgyptHomerIdeologyInternationaleLatuffMinoansNeolithic RevolutionPalestineProgressReligionWar'A Worker Reads History'AestheticsAlva NoëAnimal artAxis AgeBeing determines consciousnessCelebrityClass societyCubaDeterminismEdelmanEngels' "Origin of the Family"England riotsFAQsHip hopIron ageKey figures in Marxist aestheticsKlingenderLunacharskyMargaret ThatcherMemesMesopotamiaMichael JacksonMythologyPlekhanovPublicationsPunkQuotationsRacismReading listSaint-SimonSoviet UnionSteven RoseStreet artTerry EagletonTrotskyevolutionMarxist Theory of ArtHumanity makes itselfhttp://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)Blogger127125Marxist-Theory-Of-Arthttps://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-3561016035384596431Sat, 28 Dec 2013 02:15:00 +00002014-01-03T20:09:53.060+00:00Soviet UnionTrotskyTrotsky on Soviet culture under Stalin<i>Passage from Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), <br /><a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm#ch07-3">Chapter 7 “Family, Youth and Culture”</a></i><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MHBWogEqmBM/UscY5k16Y6I/AAAAAAAAAzE/uPqabvvvdJA/s1600/trotsky-the-revolution-betrayed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MHBWogEqmBM/UscY5k16Y6I/AAAAAAAAAzE/uPqabvvvdJA/s1600/trotsky-the-revolution-betrayed.jpg" /></a></div>Spiritual creativeness demands freedom. The very purpose of communism is to subject nature to technique and technique to plan, and compel the raw material to give unstintingly everything to man that he needs. Far more than that, its highest goal is to free finally and once for all the creative forces of mankind from all pressure, limitation and humiliating dependence. Personal relations, science and art will not know any externally imposed “plan”, nor even any shadow of compulsion. To what degree spiritual creativeness shall be individual or collective will depend entirely upon its creators.<br /><br />A transitional regime is a different thing. The dictatorship reflects the past barbarism and not the future culture. It necessarily lays down severe limitations upon all forms of activity, including spiritual creation. The programme of the revolution from the very beginning regarded these limitations as a temporary evil, and assumed the obligation, in proportion as the new regime was consolidated, to remove one after the other all restrictions upon freedom. In any case, and in the hottest years of the civil war, it was clear to the leaders of the revolution that the government could, guided by political considerations, place limitations upon creative freedom, but in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of science, literature and art. Although he had rather “conservative” personal tastes in art, Lenin remained politically extremely cautious in artistic questions, eagerly confessing his incompetence. The patronising of all kinds of modernism by Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Art and Education, was often embarrassing to Lenin. But he confined himself to ironical remarks in private conversations, and remained remote from the idea of converting his literary tastes into law. In 1924, on the threshold of the new period, the author of this book thus formulated the relation of the state to the various artistic groups and tendencies: “while holding over them all the categorical criterion, <i>for</i> the revolution or <i>against</i> the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination.”<br /><br />While the dictatorship had a seething mass-basis and a prospect of world revolution, it had no fear of experiments, searchings, the struggle of schools, for it understood that only in this way could a new cultural epoch be prepared. The popular masses were still quivering in every fibre, and were thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand years. All the best youthful forces of art were touched to the quick. During those first years, rich in hope and daring, there were created not only the most complete models of socialist legislation, but also the best productions of revolutionary literature. To the same times belong, it is worth remarking, the creation of those excellent Soviet films which, in spite of a poverty of technical means, caught the imagination of the whole world with the freshness and vigour of their approach to reality.<br /><br />In the process of struggle against the party Opposition, the literary schools were strangled one after the other. It was not only a question of literature, either. The process of extermination took place in all ideological spheres, and it took place more decisively since it was more than half unconscious. The present ruling stratum considers itself called not only to control spiritual creation politically, but also to prescribe its roads of development. The method of command-without-appeal extends in like measure to the concentration camps, to scientific agriculture and to music. The central organ of the party prints anonymous directive editorials, having the character of military orders, in architecture, literature, dramatic art, the ballet, to say nothing of philosophy, natural science and history.<br /><br />The bureaucracy superstitiously fears whatever does not serve it directly, as well as whatever it does not understand. When it demands some connection between natural science and production, this is on a large scale right; but when it commands that scientific investigators set themselves goals only of immediate practical importance, this threatens to seal up the most precious sources of invention, including practical discoveries, for these most often arise on unforeseen roads. Taught by bitter experience, the natural scientists, mathematicians, philologists, military theoreticians, avoid all broad generalisations out of fear lest some “red professor”, usually an ignorant careerist, threateningly pull up on them with some quotation dragged in by the hair from Lenin, or even from Stalin. To defend one’s own thought in such circumstances, or one’s scientific dignity, means in all probability to bring down repressions upon one’s head.<br /><br />But it is infinitely worse in the sphere of the social sciences. Economists, historians, even statisticians, to say nothing of journalists, are concerned above all things not to fall, even obliquely, into contradiction with the momentary zigzag of the official course. About Soviet economy, or domestic or foreign policy, one cannot write at all except after covering his rear and flanks with banalities from the speeches of the “leader”, and having assumed in advance the task of demonstrating that everything is going exactly as it should go and even better. Although this 100 per cent conformism frees one from everyday unpleasantnesses, it entails the heaviest of punishments: sterility. ...<br /><br />No less ruinous is the effect of the “totalitarian” regime upon artistic literature. The struggle of tendencies and schools has been replaced by interpretation of the will of the leaders. There has been created for all groups a general compulsory organisation, a kind of concentration camp of artistic literature. Mediocre but “right-thinking” storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics. Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent. Honest and talented books appear as though accidentally, bursting out from somewhere under the counter, and have the character of artistic contraband.<br /><br />The life of Soviet art is a kind of martyrology. After the editorial orders in <i>Pravda</i> against “formalism”, there began an epidemic of humiliating recantations by writers, artists, stage directors and even opera singers. One after another, they renounced their own past sins, refraining, however – in case of further emergencies – from any clear-cut definition of the nature of this “formalism.” In the long run, the authorities were compelled by a new order to put an end to a too copious flow of recantations. Literary estimates are transformed within a few weeks, textbooks made over, streets renamed, statues brought forward, as a result of a few eulogistic remarks of Stalin about the poet Mayakovsky. The impressions made by the new opera upon high-up auditors are immediately converted into a musical directive for composers. The Secretary of the Communist Youth said at a conference of writers: “The suggestions of Comrade Stalin are a law for everybody,” and the whole audience applauded, although some doubtless burned with shame. As though to complete the mockery of literature, Stalin, who does not know how to compose a Russian phrase correctly, is declared a classic in the matter of style. There is something deeply tragic in this Byzantinism and police rule, notwithstanding the involuntary comedy of certain of its manifestations.<br /><br />The official formula reads: Culture should be socialist in content, national in form. As to the content of a socialist culture, however, only certain more or less happy guesses are possible. Nobody can grow that culture upon an inadequate economic foundation. Art is far less capable than science of anticipating the future. In any case, such prescriptions as, “portray the construction of the future,” “indicate the road to socialism,” “make over mankind,” give little more to the creative imagination than does the price list of a hardware store, or a railroad timetable.<br /><br />The national form of an art is identical with its universal accessibility. “What is not wanted by the people,” <i>Pravda</i> dictates to the artists, “cannot have aesthetic significance.” That old Narodnik formula, rejecting the task of artistically educating the masses, takes on a still more reactionary character when the right to decide what art the people want and what they don’t want remains in the hands of the bureaucracy. It prints books according to its own choice. It sells them also by compulsion, offering no choice to the reader. In the last analysis the whole affair comes down in its eyes to taking care that art assimilates its interests, and finds such forms for them as will make the bureaucracy attractive to the popular masses.<br /><br />In vain! No literature can fulfill that task. The leaders themselves are compelled to acknowledge that “neither the first nor the second five-year plan has yet given us a new literary wave which can rise above the first wave born in October.” That is very mildly said. In reality, in spite of individual exceptions, the epoch of the Thermidor will go into the history of artistic creation pre-eminently as an epoch of mediocrities, laureates and toadies.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/u-q45u2TwMc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/u-q45u2TwMc/trotsky-on-soviet-culture-under-stalin.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/12/trotsky-on-soviet-culture-under-stalin.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-2004570157554092299Tue, 28 May 2013 00:18:00 +00002013-12-10T23:56:55.529+00:00Ancient GreeceWomenAntigone, Lysistrata and Medea: Feminism in Classical Greece It seems a paradox, given the breadth of popular political rights under democracy, that women had fewer rights and less freedom in most Greek cities than in contemporary Egypt and Persia. In the fiercely masculine world of ancient Greece, only males were educated and allowed to vote. The Greek love of athletics and physical perfection, worshipped in the gymnasium and on the Olympic field, was limited to the male body. In Sparta women enjoyed relatively more independence, partly because men spent so much time in barracks: Spartan women competed in gymnastics, could own land and divorce their husbands, and held influence in community matters. Nonetheless, the Greeks’ celebrated thought and inquiry hit a brick wall where gender was concerned.<br /><br />Though the realities of life meant that lower class women might work – and slaves certainly would – wealthier Greek women were expected to stay in domestic isolation, limited to childbearing, weaving and managing the household. They had no choice in marriage, becoming an object of exchange between the father and bridegroom, and had little control over property. Greek houses had an <i>andron </i>or men’s room, equipped with a door to the street so that no woman need pass through; here men would recline on seats to sing, drink and talk politics, as recreated in Plato’s <i>Symposium</i>. But the only women permitted in these discourses were servants, entertainers or <i>hetairai </i>(prostitutes).<br /><br />Women were the targets of various hostile ideas: they were high-pitched, polluting creatures, inferior imitations of men. It was a woman, Pandora, who in Greek mythology was responsible for opening a jar and releasing evil into the world [1]. Aristotle held many sexist views, arguing for example that the female character was “a sort of natural deficiency”. The historian Xenophon wrote that women should “see and hear as little as possible, and ask the fewest possible questions”.<br /><br />There is always a difference between the world of such statements and life as it was actually lived, but we would not expect female characters and deeds to be celebrated in such an atmosphere. It is typical of the wonderful contradictoriness of real life that in spite of all this misogyny, classical Greek theatre provides us with arguably the world’s first ‘feminist’ plays. Here we shall pick out three outstanding texts: <i>Antigone</i>, <i>Lysistrata </i>and <i>Medea</i>.<br /><br /><b><i>Antigone</i></b><br /><br />Sophocles’ drama <i>Antigone</i>, written around 441 BCE, is one of his three ‘Theban plays’ that chronicle the dark fortunes of the house of Oedipus, king of Thebes. After Oedipus’ death, there is a struggle over the kingship between his two sons Eteocles and Polyneices. The army of Polyneices marches on Thebes and is defeated, but both brothers are killed in the battle. The new ruler, Creon, decrees that whereas Eteocles will be buried with full honours for defending the city, the rebel Polyneices must be denied holy rites and left to rot in the field.<br /><br />Shortly afterwards, a sentry runs in, reporting that someone has disobeyed and performed a burial. The guards exhume the body and watch from a distance in the hope that the culprit will return. Their trap succeeds and they arrest the rebel trying to rebury the body. She is Antigone, sister of Polyneices and Eteocles, and niece of Creon.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j8lfQhuqjlU/UaP60x_VH4I/AAAAAAAAAxA/OXXWJ1TvAzw/s1600/antigone-presented-to-creon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j8lfQhuqjlU/UaP60x_VH4I/AAAAAAAAAxA/OXXWJ1TvAzw/s320/antigone-presented-to-creon.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><i>Antigone (right) presented to Creon (seated) by a guard. <span class="tabtext">Athenian vase painting by the Dolon Painter, ca. 380-370 BCE.</span></i><br /><br /><i>Antigone </i>raises several key questions around the relationship between human beings and the gods and the nature of kingship. However, one of the play’s most interesting features for a modern audience is its embryonic feminism. Antigone takes centre stage, showing us that not all the rebels in her family are men.<br /><br />In the opening scene of the play, Antigone tries to win her sister Ismene’s help in burying their brother. Ismene refuses, taking the traditional, perhaps stereotypical, female role:<br /><blockquote>Now we two [are] left; and what will be the end of us,<br />If we transgress the law and defy our king?<br />O think, Antigone; we are women; it is not for us<br />To fight against men; our rulers are stronger than we<br />And we must obey in this, or in worse than this.<br />May the dead forgive me, I can do no other<br />But as I am commanded; to do more is madness.[2]</blockquote>When Antigone is brought before Creon, she does not deny what she has done, even though the admission means a death sentence, and she shows no fear of Creon, the dominant male of the drama. Instead she directly challenges him for putting his own human law before that of the gods.<br /><blockquote>CREON: Did you know the order forbidding such an act?<br />ANTIGONE: I knew it, naturally. It was plain enough.<br />CREON: And yet you dared to contravene it?<br />ANTIGONE: Yes.<br />That order did not come from God. Justice,<br />That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.<br />I did not think your edicts strong enough<br />To overrule the unwritten unalterable laws<br />Of God and heaven, you being only a man.</blockquote>Religion offered women one of their few public roles. Priestesses managed funding of temples, held the keys to temple wealth, and helped society to function through the performance of ritual. It is probably no coincidence therefore that it is a woman who performs the ritual burial and shows the greatest concern for religious correctness.<br /><br />Creon is unbending and orders Antigone to be shut into a cave to slowly die. The reason for this harshness partly lies in his anger at Polyneices’ attack and in his belief in the importance of strong kingship. But it is also explicitly because Antigone’s rebellion threatens the sexual hierarchy of ancient Greece, in which women’s proper place is to be kept indoors – “we’ll have no woman’s law here, while I live.” As he later explains to his son Haemon:<br /><blockquote>...I hold to the law,<br />And will never betray it – least of all for a woman.<br />Better be beaten, if need be, by a man<br />Than let a woman get the better of us.</blockquote>When the blind prophet Teiresias warns Creon that the gods are angry at his treatment of Polyneices’ corpse, the king is shaken. He orders the body to be buried and tries to release Antigone, but it is too late – she has already taken her own life in despair. Haemon, who was Antigone’s betrothed, has done the same; and when she hears of her son’s death, Creon’s wife Eurydice adds her own suicide to the bodycount.<br /><br />In the debate over the correct treatment of a dead rebel, both Antigone and Creon have valid arguments, but Sophocles chooses to vindicate Antigone, who is brave enough to defy the king to do what she thinks is right. She loses her life, but it is Creon who is punished by the gods. If Creon represents human law, Antigone represents divine law, which is infinitely greater.<br /><br /><i><b>Lysistrata</b></i><br /><br />Aristophanes’ comedy <i>Lysistrata </i>concerns an extraordinary plan to put an end to the Peloponnesian War. When the play was written in 411 BCE, the Athenian empire and an alliance led by Sparta had for twenty years shed one another’s blood, destroyed cities, and devastated the countryside. The war eventually exhausted Athens and brought the ‘golden age’ of Classical Greece to an end. <br /><br />An Athenian named Lysistrata (‘Liquidator of Armies’) calls a meeting of women from across Greece – from Thebes, Corinth, even the arch-enemy Sparta – and persuades them to refuse sex until the men agree to stop fighting. Their abstinence is all the more heroic when we consider that the Greeks thought women were the more lascivious of the sexes. The women seize the Acropolis, where the treasury is kept, and bar the doors to stop the men taking it back. When elders, magistrate and constables turn up, the women respond with bad language and violence, ranging from hurling water to pitched fisticuffs.<br /><br />Lysistrata explains to the magistrate that women know everything that is going on, but when they complain about the men’s mistakes they are told to keep quiet by their husbands. “Quite right too,” says the magistrate.<br /><blockquote>LYSISTRATA: Right? That we should not be allowed to make the least little suggestion to you, no matter how much you mismanage your affairs? But now every time two men meet in the street, what do they say? ‘Isn’t there a man in the country?’ And the answer comes, ‘Not one.’ That’s why we women got together and decided to unite and save Greece… So let’s make a deal. You listen to us – and it’ll be good advice we give – listen to us and keep quiet, like you made us do, and we’ll set you to rights.[3]</blockquote>Women, too, argues Lysistrata, have made sacrifices in the war, watching their sons and husbands leave to fight. Their demand that the men come home so both sexes can live in peace is both legitimate and reasonable.<br /><br />Eventually the sex strike takes its effect and the increasingly frustrated men meet with the women to negotiate. Lysistrata introduces a female companion, Reconciliation, and lectures the delegates on the common culture and interests of the warring Greek sides, and how they have come to each other’s aid in the past. Beguiled by Reconciliation, the delegates come to terms, and when the women agree to resume sexual activity the play closes with garlands and dancing. The women have succeeded in forcing peace.<br /><br />In ancient Greece women played very little political role. The one example of a female ‘tall poppy’, Pericles’ partner Aspasia, appears to have been intelligent, witty and cultured, exercising political influence at the highest level in Athens – and she attracted loathing, political attacks and gossip. Plutarch wrote: <br /><blockquote>Aspasia, as some say, was held in high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom. Socrates sometimes came to see her with his disciples, and his intimate friends brought their wives to her to hear her discourse.[4]</blockquote>By contrast, he goes on to claim she ran a brothel – it’s impossible to know if this is true, or mere slander. Aristophanes himself, in <i>The Acharnians</i>, accuses Aspasia of being responsible for the Peloponnesian War, much as another woman, Helen of Troy, was often blamed for the Trojan War. Yet the loud, brash women who take the destiny of their nations in their hands in <i>Lysistrata </i>would be remarkable characters in any literature. <br /><br />Critics may point out that the female characters are simply using their sexuality to gain their ends, that Aristophanes views the empowerment of women as comical, or that he exploits female stereotypes. The women’s goal is a return to the pre-war way of life, not a sexual revolution. But the play remains highly subversive. Lysistrata explicitly argues for greater respect for women’s opinions and abilities. When we watch her outshining the Magistrate in argument, or watch the women outfighting the men, Aristophanes is allowing, whatever his other intentions, that women can act on an equal basis with men.<br /><br /><i><b>Medea</b></i><br /><br />Euripides’ tragedy <i>Medea</i>, written in about 431 BCE, tells how a woman takes terrible revenge on her husband when he betrays her for another woman. <br /><br />The hero Jason (of Argonauts fame) married Medea after she helped him win the Golden Fleece, and they fled together to Corinth after bringing about the death of King Pelias of Iolcus. But Jason, to make an alliance and guarantee the future of his two sons, marries Glauce, the daughter of the King of Corinth. Medea – “a frightening woman” as her slave nurse warns us – is devastated: weeping, refusing to eat, and barely able to look at her sons. After the initial paroxysm of grief she becames cooler and plots her revenge.<br /><br />Cruel, dangerous and fierce-willed, Medea could easily be a one-dimensional harridan.Yet despite the crimes she is about to commit, Euripedes allows her considerable sympathy, as when she laments the situation of women:<br /><blockquote>Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women<br />Are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum,<br />We have bought a husband, we must then accept him as<br />Possessor of our body. This is to aggravate<br />Wrong with worse wrong. Then the great question: will the man<br />We get be bad or good? For women, divorce is not<br />Respectable; to repel the man, not possible.[5]</blockquote>Her difficulties are aggravated by her foreign birth – Medea is from Colchis on the Black Sea, in modern-day Georgia.<br /><br />She goes on:<br /><blockquote>...If a man grows tired<br />Of the company at home, he can go out, and find<br />A cure for tediousness. We wives are forced to look<br />To one man only. And, they tell us, we at home<br />Live free from danger, they go out to battle: fools!<br />I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear<br />One child.</blockquote>The king of Corinth comes to Medea to order her into immediate exile, fearful of her reputation and what she might do. Medea persuades him to allow her one more day so she can make arrangements for her sons, a concession that will prove fatal for the king. When Jason pleads his case with her, Medea shows none of the submission we might expect from a traditional Greek wife. She calls him a ‘filthy coward’ who has abandoned her sexually and remarried behind her back, reminding him of the lengths she went to so he might win the Golden Fleece – including murdering her brother to delay pursuers, and convincing Pelias’ daughters to boil their father alive.<br /><br />Medea begins her revenge by securing asylum from the unsuspecting Aegeus of Athens. Then, feigning contrition, she makes a gift to Glauce of a dress and coronet treated with poison. Her most dreadful plan however is to break Jason’s heart by murdering their two children.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a_EbNuHOjho/UaPOalTUa6I/AAAAAAAAAwo/qMe-Rj1KdLE/s1600/medea-vase.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a_EbNuHOjho/UaPOalTUa6I/AAAAAAAAAwo/qMe-Rj1KdLE/s320/medea-vase.jpg" /></a><i>Medea killing her son. Vase by Ixion Painter, ca. 330 BCE.</i><br /><br />Medea is not entirely cold-hearted, and understands perfectly what she is about to do. As Jason talks about what his sons will be like when they are fully-grown, she breaks down and weeps, and in a moment of doubt it seems that perhaps she won’t be able to go through with it. But once Glauce and her father have died in agony from poison – described for us in ghastly detail by an eye-witness – there is no turning back, as the boys would be hunted down anyway by the vengeful Corinthians.<br /><br />Medea is guilty of one of the most unacceptable crimes: a mother killing her own children. Yet she is also an incredibly willful woman with a sense of honour as strong as any Greek hero. “Yes, I can endure guilt, however horrible; / The laughter of my enemies I will not endure.” And in a remarkable conclusion, her actions go unpunished. As Jason bursts in seeking his children, Medea is lifted aloft by a <a href="http://www.clevelandart.org/art/1991.1?f[0]=field_collection:826">chariot</a> drawn by dragons, sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios. She has won her revenge against Jason by slaying his new bride and his children, and instead of being struck down for daring to stand up to her husband and perverting the norms of womanhood, she is carried off to sanctuary in Athens. The gods – themselves fickle and vengeful beings – actually appear to vindicate her behaviour.<br /><br />The Chorus of women of Corinth sum up Medea’s impact thus:<br /><blockquote>Legend will now reverse our reputation;<br />A time comes when the female sex is honoured;<br />That old discordant slander<br />Shall no more hold us subject.<br />Male poets of past ages, with their ballads<br />Of faithless women, shall go out of fashion...<br />We’d counter with our epics against man.</blockquote>This challenging subject matter may explain why Euripedes came third out of three in the tragedy competition of 431 BCE. If the Athenian judges didn’t like the play, posterity has a different view. Of course, we may interpret Medea as a hysterical female, a warning of what women are capable of if not held in check. But Euripedes’ work is more complex than this. Medea is always articulate and human, and she cannot be explained away by casual sexism or xenophobia. In the male-dominated world of ancient Greece, Euripedes has created a woman whose sex drive is more powerful than her maternal instincts, and done so triumphantly.<br /><br /><b>Conclusion</b><br /><br />Even the female parts in Greek theatre were played by males, and it is uncertain whether they were even allowed to attend performances. Given the origins of theatre in ritual, a thoroughly female social activity, it would be strange if women were forbidden to attend. But even if they did, the target audience was generally assumed to be male. There is no evidence that women played any part in the writing, production or judging of plays.<br /><br />It is unlikely therefore that any of these three plays was intended as a ‘feminist’ text. <i>Antigone</i>, <i>Lysistrata </i>and <i>Medea</i> were all written by aristocratic men, many centuries before a coherent body of feminist theory began to be assembled. <br /><br />Yet there are always contradictions between cultural conventions – such as ‘women are born inferior to men’ – and the richness of actual lived experience. This creates opportunities for artists to develop an awareness that goes beyond stereotypes, and write characters or discourses that run against the societal norm even without intending it. We can stage convincingly feminist interpretations of these plays today because the opportunities are in the texts themselves; strong female characters shine through despite the misogyny of the culture. The best Classical Greek writers were engaging dynamically with one of the first truly literate societies, and infused their work with the stuff of real life – including in the relations of men and women. <br /><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes">[1] Unwittingly, it must be said.<br />[2] Quotes from Sophocles’ <i>Antigone</i> are from E.F. Watling’s translation in Penguin Classics.<br />[3] Quotes from Aristophanes’ <i>Lysistrata</i> are from Alan Sommerstein’s translation in Penguin Classics.<br />[4] Plutarch, <i><a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Pericles*.html">Lives</a></i>, ‘Pericles’ v24.<br /> [5] The ‘extravagant sum’ refers to a dowry. Quotes from Euripedes’ <i>Medea </i> are from Phillip Vellacott’s translation in Penguin Classics. </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/50zsOC8gNPo" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/50zsOC8gNPo/antigone-lysistrata-and-medea-feminism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/05/antigone-lysistrata-and-medea-feminism.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-4569363560541585313Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:36:00 +00002013-04-21T12:20:40.839+01:00Margaret ThatcherOn the death of Margaret ThatcherSome responses by artists and performers to Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday.<br /><br /> I don&rsquo;t agree, by the way, with partying in the street, or attempting to disrupt the funeral. This might satisfy the grievances of a minority of left-wingers, but must seem distasteful to most Britons, despite everything Thatcher did in her war against the working class. The enemy is not one old woman with dementia who had no direct influence on politics any more: it is <i>Thatcherism</i> as the ideology of right-wing reaction against the advances of the left from 1945-79.<br /><br /><b>John Cullagh: <i>I’ll Dance On Your Grave Mrs Thatcher</i></b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1bJbeeKBPCU" width="480"></iframe> <br /><br /><br /> <b>Morrissey: <i>Margaret on the Guillotine</i></b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/smzsIONNh0w" width="480"></iframe> <br />The kind people<br />Have a wonderful dream<br />Margaret On The Guillotine<br />Cause people like you<br />Make me feel so tired<br />When will you die?<br />When will you die?<br />When will you die?<br />When will you die?<br />When will you die?<br /><br />And people like you<br />Make me feel so old inside<br />Please die<br /><br />And kind people<br />Do not shelter this dream<br />Make it real<br />Make the dream real<br />Make the dream real<br />Make it real<br />Make the dream real<br /><br /><br /> <b>Hefner: <i>The Day That Thatcher Dies</i></b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/s4BCUWopQQ4" width="480"></iframe> <br />We will laugh the day that Thatcher dies,<br />Even though we know it’s not right,<br />We will dance and sing all night.<br /><br />I was blind in 1979, by ’82 I had clues,<br />By 1986 I was mad as hell.<br /><br />The teachers at school, they took us for fools,<br />They never taught us what to do,<br />But Christ we were strong, we knew all along,<br />We taught ourselves the right from wrong.<br /><br />And the punk rock kids, and the techno kids,<br />No, it’s not their fault.<br />And the hip hop boys and heavy metal girls,<br />No, it’s not their fault.<br /><br />It was love, but Tories don’t know what that means,<br />She was Michelle Cox from the lower stream,<br />She wore high-heeled shoes while the rest wore flat soles.<br /><br />And the playground taught her how to be cruel,<br />I talked politics and she called me a fool,<br />She wrapped her ankle chain round my left wing heart.<br /><br />Ding dong, the witch is dead, which old witch?<br />The wicked witch.<br />Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.<br /><br /><br /><b>Danny’s speech from the movie <i>Brassed Off</i> (1996).</b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lKx3MUqzCcQ" width="480"></iframe> <br /><br /><b>Elvis Costello: <i>Tramp the Dirt Down</i></b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9t4-zDem1Sk" width="480"></iframe> <br />Well I hope I don’t die too soon<br />I pray the lord my soul to save<br />Oh I’ll be a good boy, I’m trying so hard to behave<br />Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live<br />Long enough to savour<br />That’s when they finally put you in the ground<br />I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down<br /><br /><br /><b>Pete Wylie: <i>The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies!</i></b><br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/wcXi-VYy_Yw" width="480"></iframe><br /><br /><b><i>But the final word belongs to Gerry Adams, leader of the most advanced political current in these islands. The working class suffered across Britain, but nowhere so intensely as in the occupied counties of Ireland, where the armed struggle meant a risk of death:</i></b><br /><br /><blockquote>Margaret Thatcher did great hurt to the Irish and British people during her time as British Prime Minister.<br /><br />Working class communities were devastated in Britain because of her policies.<br /><br />Her role in international affairs was equally belligerent whether in support of the Chilean dictator Pinochet, her opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa; and her support for the Khmer Rouge.<br /><br />Here in Ireland her espousal of old draconian militaristic policies prolonged the war and caused great suffering. She embraced censorship, collusion and the killing of citizens by covert operations, including the targeting of solicitors like Pat Finucane, alongside more open military operations and refused to recognise the rights of citizens to vote for parties of their choice.<br /><br />Her failed efforts to criminalise the republican struggle and the political prisoners is part of her legacy.<br /><br />It should be noted that in complete contradiction of her public posturing, she authorised a back channel of communications with the Sinn Féin leadership but failed to act on the logic of this.<br /><br />Unfortunately she was faced with weak Irish governments who failed to oppose her securocrat agenda or to enlist international support in defence of citizens in the north.<br /><br />Margaret Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and ’81.<br /><br />Her Irish policy failed miserably.</blockquote><br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/2UG3Fjrb5aU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/2UG3Fjrb5aU/on-death-of-margaret-thatcher.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-death-of-margaret-thatcher.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-4456294814056740079Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +00002013-04-01T23:32:36.655+01:00Ancient GreeceDe Ste Croix on Greek artThe two passages below, selected for their relevance to the topic of ancient Greek art, are reproduced from <i>The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World</i> by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix (1981). This mighty work of Marxist scholarship is one of the best books on the ancient world.<br /><br />On the class nature of Greek art: <br /><blockquote>The most important single dividing line which we can draw between different groups of free men in the Greek world is, in my opinion, that which separated off from the common herd those I am calling ‘the propertied class’, who could ‘live of their own’ without having to spend more than a fraction of their time working for their living. …<br /><br />Although small peasants and other free men such as artisans and shopkeepers, <i>working on their own account</i>, without much property of their own, must always have formed a substantial proportion of the <i>free</i> population of the Greek world, and indeed were probably a majority of the <i>whole</i> population until about the end of the third century of the Christian era, they would normally have to spend most of their time working for their livelihood, with their families, at somewhere near the subsistence level, and would not be able to live securely and at leisure, as members of the upper class… By and large, a comfortable, leisured existence could be secured only by the possession of property (primarily in land…) which alone gave the upper classes that command over the labour of others which made it possible for them to live the good life, as the Greeks saw it, a life not constrained by the inescapable necessity of working for one’s living, a life which could be devoted to the pursuits considered proper for a gentleman: politics or generalship, intellectual or artistic pursuits, hunting or athletics… <br /><br />These men, liberated from toil, are the people who produced virtually all Greek art and literature and science and philosophy, and provided a good proportion of the armies which won remarkable victories by land over the Persian invaders at Marathon in 490 and at Plataea in 479 BC. In a very real sense most of them were parasitic upon other men, their slaves above all; most of them were not supporters of the democracy which ancient Greece invented and which was its great contribution to political progress, although they did supply almost all its leaders... But what we know as Greek civilisation expressed itself in and through them above all, and it is they who will normally occupy the centre of our picture.<br /><br />(pp114–5) </blockquote>In this next passage De Ste Croix comments on the status of the artist later, in the Roman period, and the distinction that had begun to be drawn between amateur and professional art production:<br /><blockquote>There is a much-quoted passage in Plutarch’s <i>Life of Pericles</i> (2.1-2) which some people today may find astonishing: in Plutarch’s eyes no young gentleman, just because he had seen the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia or the Hera of Polycleitus at Argos (two of the most admired ancient statues) could possibly want to <i>be </i>Pheidias or Polycleitus. Such statements in the mouth of a ‘real Roman’ might not seem so surprising, it will be said; but was not L. Mestrius Plutarchus, the Roman citizen (albeit a newly-made, first-generation one), also very much a Greek? The answer is that in the Roman period the Greek as well as the Roman propertied classes felt a greater gulf between themselves and all those (including <i>technitai</i>, and therefore ‘artists’) who engaged in ‘banausic’ occupations than had the leading Greeks of the Classical period, at least in Athens and some other democracies. Had Pheidias and Polycleitus sculpted purely as amateurs, had they enjoyed large private incomes and received no payment for their artistic work, Plutarch and his like would have found nothing contemptible about them. It was the fact that they could be considered to have <i>earned their living</i> by actually working with their own hands that made them no fit model for the young Graeco-Roman gentleman. Plutarch says elsewhere that the Athenian painter Polygnotus showed he was no mere <i>technites </i>by decorating the Stoa Poikile at Athens <i>gratis </i>(<i>Cimon</i> 4.7).<br /><br />Since in a class society many of the values of the governing class are often accepted far down the social scale, we must expect to find disparagement of craftsmen, and therefore even of artists, existing in the ancient world not only among the propertied Few. In particular, anyone who aspired to enter the propertied class would tend to accept its scale of values ever more completely as he progressed towards joining it. Yet it would be absurd to suggest that the lower classes as a whole dutifully accepted the social snobbery and contempt for the ‘banausic’ that prevailed among the well-to-do. Many Greeks (and western Romans) who might be called ‘mere artisans’ by superior people even today were evidently very proud of their skills and felt that they had acquired dignity by the exercise of them: they referred to them with pride in their dedications and their epitaphs, and they often chose to be pictured on their tombstones in the practice of their craft or trade, humble as it might be in the eyes of their ‘betters’. To say that ‘the ancient Greeks’ despised craftsmen is one of those deeply misleading statements which show blindness to the existence of all but the propertied Few. <br /><br />(pp274–5) </blockquote>Readers interested in De Ste Croix can find David Harvey’s <i>Guardian</i> obituary article at: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/feb/10/historybooks.obituaries">http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/feb/10/historybooks.obituaries</a>.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/6DkU6ZNVYwo" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/6DkU6ZNVYwo/de-ste-croix-on-greek-art.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/04/de-ste-croix-on-greek-art.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-6481797902931537102Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:44:00 +00002013-05-11T13:48:27.867+01:00Ancient GreeceThe origins of ancient Greek art: summary<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D_Iaffaip9U/UVQR-_opzkI/AAAAAAAAAvo/VcQhWhBP-fs/s1600/riace-bronzes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D_Iaffaip9U/UVQR-_opzkI/AAAAAAAAAvo/VcQhWhBP-fs/s320/riace-bronzes.jpg" width="177" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption"><i>The Riace bronzes, recovered from<br />the sea in 1972</i></td></tr></tbody></table>Classical Greece saw a relatively brief flowering of unusual brilliance in many fields, including theatre, mathematics, philosophy, sculpture, history, technology and painting. I haven’t tried to summarise these well-documented achievements. Nor do I dispute them. My aim in the last few articles has instead been to put Classical Greek art into context and analyse why it happened.<br /><br />There was of course nothing innately superior about the people living in Greece – happily, contemporary historians avoid the gushings of the last few centuries. And there was no shortage of brilliance among contemporary cultures such as Persia. The Axis Age saw extraordinary cultural leaps in several centres of world culture, and so-called ‘golden ages’ are found elsewhere in history too. India, for example, enjoyed a particularly brilliant period during the Gupta empire of c.320 to 550 CE. When Arnold Hauser refers in <i>The Social History of Art</i> to the ‘native genius’ of the Greeks, we may well wonder where that genius was hiding for the few thousand years before Homer or the two thousand after the Roman conquest, during which – with all due respect – Greek cultural achievement has been much nearer the average.<br /><br />There was an intensity and innovation in Classical Greece, peaking in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, which can be explained as a particular combination of elements.<br /><br />The fragmentation of Greece into relatively isolated city-states, and the absence therefore of a hegemonic ruling class and religion, helped open the door to democracy and individualism. The economic revival from the 8th and 7th centuries BCE onwards, assisted by the spread of iron technology, bankrolled an anti-monarchic oligarchy, opened up contacts with the wider Mediterranean and Eastern worlds, and provided resources for cultural investment – a revival later intensified in the epicentre, Athens, by silver mining and imperial tribute.<br /><br />The advent of literate culture encouraged public debate and scientific inquiry. The Greeks inherited the best of the discoveries of their Iron Age contemporaries – the Phoenician alphabet, Babylonian astronomy, Egyptian sculpture, etc – and assimilated them into a theoretical culture that laid everything open to question. We can credit them with the invention of democracy, history and drama. <br /><br />The foundations of Classical Greek art rest on a number of factors of which only one – democracy – was unique to Greece. However, it was the individualism which flowed from mass political participation that is probably the most powerful element in defining the art of Greece as against the art of contemporary cultures, underlying its (relative) orientation to the human over the divine, its realism, its observation of nature, and its interest in a sense of time as actually experienced. It was in the wake of the closing down of the democratic revolution by Alexander and the Romans that the world cultural significance of Greek achievements faded.<br /><br />A millenium and a half later, the achievements of Classical Greece would be selectively fished out of history by the young bourgeoisie and claimed as ancestors, to legitimise their own revolutionary worldview and to create a narrative about the origins of ‘Western’ civilisation which persists to this day. There is some truth in the narrative, but it has been exaggerated by propaganda, Eurocentrism and racism. The West’s debt to the civilisations of the East is at least as immense.<br /><br />The Classical Greeks created an art which achieved vitality, clarity and harmony, and like any major art, it belongs to all the world. <br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/w3VSLfrUI2w" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/w3VSLfrUI2w/the-origins-of-ancient-greek-art-summary.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-origins-of-ancient-greek-art-summary.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-5862854440366896049Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:05:00 +00002013-03-28T09:05:41.500+00:00Ancient GreeceTerry EagletonTerry Eagleton on Marx and the Greeks<i>I reproduce below a passage by Terry Eagleton from his book </i>Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)<i>. His section on ‘Literature and Superstructure’ includes an interesting comment on Marx and Greek art.</i><br /><br /><br />The materialist theory of history denies that art can <i>in itself </i>change the course of history; but it insists that art can be an active element in such change. Indeed, when Marx came to consider the relation between base and superstructure, it was art which he selected as an instance of the complexity and indirectness of that relationship:<br /><br /><blockquote>In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organisation. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. It is even recognised that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art, as such, begins; that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of art, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified.[1]</blockquote><br />Marx is considering here what he calls ‘the unequal relationship of the development of material production... to artistic production’. It does not follow that the greatest artistic achievements depend upon the highest development of the productive forces, as the example of the Greeks, who produced major art in an economically undeveloped society, clearly evidences. Certain major artistic forms like the epic are only <i>possible </i>in an undeveloped society. Why then, Marx goes on to ask, do we still respond to such forms, given our historical distance from them?:<br /><br /><blockquote>But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.</blockquote><br />Why does Greek art still give us aesthetic pleasure? The answer which Marx goes on to provide has been universally lambasted by unsympathetic commentators as lamely inept:<br /><br /><blockquote>A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naivete, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. (It) is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone rise, can never return.</blockquote><br />So our liking for Greek art is a nostalgic lapse back into childhood – a piece of unmaterialist sentimentalism which hostile critics have gladly pounced on. But the passage can only be treated thus if it is rudely ripped from the context to which it belongs – the draft manuscripts of 1857, known today as the <i>Grundrisse</i>. Once returned to that context, the meaning becomes instantly apparent. The Greeks, Marx is arguing, were able to produce major art not <i>in spite of</i> but <i>because of</i> the undeveloped state of their society. In ancient societies, which have not yet undergone the fragmenting ‘division of labour’ known to capitalism, the overwhelming of ‘quality’ by ‘quantity’ which results from commodity-production and the restless, continual development of the productive forces, a certain ‘measure’ or harmony can be achieved between man and Nature – a harmony precisely dependent upon the <i>limited </i>nature of Greek society. The ‘childlike’ world of the Greeks is attractive because it thrives within certain measured limits – measures and limits which are brutally overridden by bourgeois society in its limitless demand to produce and consume. Historically, it is essential that this constricted society should be broken up as the productive forces expand beyond its frontiers; but when Marx speaks of ‘striv(ing) to reproduce its truth at a higher stage’, he is clearly speaking of the communist society of the future, where unlimited resources will serve an unlimitedly developing man.<br /><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes">[1] Introduction to the <i>Grundrisse</i>.<br /></span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/Yyhuyd7TJBw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/Yyhuyd7TJBw/terry-eagleton-on-marx-and-greeks.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/terry-eagleton-on-marx-and-greeks.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-400959115073758751Sun, 24 Mar 2013 13:09:00 +00002013-03-24T13:54:03.189+00:00Ancient GreeceAncient Greece: Making sculpture their ownTo gain an insight into how ancient Greece transformed artistic conventions to create their own aesthetic, we may take a lesson from one of their most renowned achievements: sculpture.<br /><br />Classical Greek sculpture probably had its beginnings in the assimilation of Near Eastern and Egyptian styles during what we now call the Archaic period (ca. 700–450 BC). The colonisation of the Mediterranean coast and the opening of new trade routes introduced Greek artists to Eastern imagery such as composite beasts – griffins, sphinxes – and palmette and lotus motifs. Herodotus claims in the <i>Histories </i>that Greeks and Egyptians began to interact during the reign of the Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who came to power in 664 BCE. The Egyptians possessed great skills in cutting, transporting and carving huge pieces of stone, and their monumental stone statues and architecture seem to have made a profound impression on the Greeks, who in the second half of the seventh century began to imitate them on a smaller scale back home. <br /><br />But whereas Egyptian statues are schematic and rigid, we know Greek sculpture as naturalistic and fluid in movement. To understand why sculpture took such different forms in the two societies, we need to look back to the arguments made in the last few articles.<br /><br /><b>Breathing new life into traditional art</b><br /><br />The first step toward the sculpture of Classical Greece was the appearance of human figures known as <i>kouros </i>(male) and <i>kore </i>(female) statues, in the 7th century BCE. These youthful statues seem to have been used as dedications to gods and as tomb monuments. They have a visible relationship to Egyptian models, with stiff upright posture, one foot taking a step forwards, youthful curls mimicking the pharaonic headdress. This sort of stylisation meant that, like the Egyptians, Greek sculptors could produce figures according to a formula.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eA8m3I2idY4/UU71uo6DauI/AAAAAAAAAvc/NdAeAVLCWWc/s1600/egypt-meets-greece.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eA8m3I2idY4/UU71uo6DauI/AAAAAAAAAvc/NdAeAVLCWWc/s1600/egypt-meets-greece.jpg" width="235" /></a></div><i>Egypt meets Greece. On the left, statue of the mayor Nen-kheft-ka, ca 2350 BCE. On the right, one of a pair of marbles depicting Kleobis and Biton, ca. 580 BC.</i><br /><br />However, democracy introduced into Greek society a completely different spiritual dynamic. Egyptian statues attempt to impress us with the eternal truth of religion and class hierarchy. As <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/ancient-greece-democracy-and.html">we have been arguing</a>, the Greek context of many city states, with no centralised nobility, and a democratic system granting freedom of speech even to a section of the masses, influenced the cultural conditions in which Greek art was created. The influence of individualism and a new interest in the human over the divine led Greek artists to gradually become interested in representing particular, lifelike human beings, and to this end sought to depict what they <i>saw</i>, rather than what they had been told or thought they knew. For these reasons, Greek sculpture moved away from the rigid Egyptian model. <br /><br />The <i>kouros </i>is always on a human rather than a monumental scale. Whereas an Egyptian statue was often supported by a pillar, the <i>kouros </i>supports itself, and it is tempting to read this as a symbol of greater confidence in human capacities. We see an increasing secularism in the gradual appearance of artists’ or patrons’ names carved onto the pedestals, and the smile that plays on the statues’ lips breathes human expression into lifeless stone. The sculptors kept striving for ever greater realism in features and anatomy, and by the early fifth century BCE, the <i>kouros </i>had relaxed and become more natural. <br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wdZxkUhg2G0/UU47HQlbJXI/AAAAAAAAAvQ/rveCcslzzRw/s1600/kritios-boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wdZxkUhg2G0/UU47HQlbJXI/AAAAAAAAAvQ/rveCcslzzRw/s1600/kritios-boy.jpg" width="162" /></a><i>The Kritios Boy. Photo: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tetraktys">Tetraktys</a>.</i><br /><br />The Kritios (or Kritian) Boy, a statue dating to around 480 BCE, illustrates how the <i>kouros </i>had been brought to life. The sculptor sees the figure as a system of parts that is in balance: the left leg takes the weight while the right bends at the knee, subtly shifting the torso. The anatomy is accurate but graceful. This statue is clearly the product of trying to capture the pose of actual standing figures through careful observation. It represents the last phase of the <i>kouros</i>, and is the immediate precursor to the athletes and heroes of Classical Greek sculpture. <br /><br /><b>Classical sculpture</b><br /><br />In the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, now known as the Classical period of Greek art, we see a revolutionary leap to a new form. Greek sculptors had thoroughly mastered the technical aspects of working marble. They had the advantage of iron tools and might model in clay, making moulds to allow for casting with bronze. They also began to produce work that celebrated expressiveness and movement in a way never seen before in sculpture. By studying how nature actually worked, they could show subtle variations in poses and drapery. This took sculpture in a direction quite unlike the Greeks’ contemporaries.<br /><br />The human body was explored through its anatomy, its three-dimensionality, and its potential for aesthetic grace. The sculptor Polykleitos wrote a treatise or <i>Canon </i>that discussed mathematical proportions for the human figure while exploring how a figure could be brought to life through the counterbalance of relaxed and tensed parts. The Greeks also portrayed subjects that existed in ‘human’ time, such as in Myron’s <i>Discobolus</i>, a statue of a discus-thrower paused at the dramatic moment before the discus is released. <br /><br />This approach introduced an unprecedented vitality into sculpture. By all accounts, sculptors such as Phidias, Praxiteles, Lysippos and others created elegant works which brought this balance of realism and idealism to an unprecedented perfection. Tragically, only a tiny portion of original Greek sculpture has survived. But the fact that we know their names, and that they were renowned even when alive, is revealing about the permeation of individualism into Greek culture at a time when so much artistic work was anonymous. <br /><br />We are used to seeing Greek sculpture in the pure white of exposed marble, so our usual image of these works is rather severe. The contemporary reality was different: pigment traces reveal that statues and temples were painted in vivid colours. Bettany Hughes has evoked how Athens must have looked: <br /><br /><blockquote>Athens was a territory where the breathing population was watched by beautifully worked stone and metal men – idealised versions of humankind, an embodiment of the democratic Athenians’ ambition. Sculptures – bronze, marble, wood – all dressed in real clothes as if they suffered hot and cold like any other human, lined the sanctuaries, the roads, the colonnades, the law-courts. Only a tiny fraction of the bronze statuary cast in Athens in the fifth century remains, so it can be easy to underestimate just what a packed, ever-expanding site-specific gallery this city was, the public spaces populated by crowds of silent humans. Silent, but not muted. With a showman’s urge to make their new attraction (in this case, the show city of democracy) as gaudy as any Persian king’s court or Babylonian tyrant’s processional way, the Athenians stage-set <i>demos-kratia</i>. Statues, monuments, temples, democratic courts were all painted and stained in Technicolour. The stark application and gloopy pigments used would shock most of us today, but these were designed to be seen under the bright Attic sun, and their gaudy glory to be remembered. [1] </blockquote><br />The Greeks would have seen their sculpture not as sterile and cold, mounted on a museum wall, but as exuberant, arrogant and buoyant with life [2]. <br /><br /><b>A comment on aesthetic value</b><br /><br /> Is Greek sculpture <i>better </i>than Egyptian or other Eastern sculpture because of its innovations? It is surely more vital and naturalistic, and this will usually be more to the Western taste, but it would be a mistake to claim that the Greeks or their culture were ‘superior’ to the East. This is a myth constructed from the Renaissance onwards to justify Eurocentrism and racism. The Egyptians were perfectly capable of realist sculpture, as we see from examples such as the famous head of Nefertiti, and they were also capable of great vitality, as in the paintings from Nebamun’s tomb. The reason they did not develop these skills in the same direction as the Greeks was that their cultural needs were different. It is the material and ideological conditions of a culture that define most powerfully the particular qualities of its art.<br /><br />In Classical Greece, these conditions included a fragmented ruling class, democracy and individualism, and a newly literate culture that encouraged inquiry into the natural world. The result was a balance between their delight in naturalism and a very traditional desire for order and proportion. Some cultures adopted this art as an aesthetic standard, others chose to physically smash it; either way, it was characteristically Greek. <br /><br /><hr /><br /><span class="footnotes">[1] Bettany Hughes, <i>The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life</i> (2010).<br />[2] The colour restoration work of German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann offers us an insight into how ancient Greek sculpture looked in its heyday.<br /><br /> </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/EoZMzVpNNg8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/EoZMzVpNNg8/ancient-greece-making-sculpture-their.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/ancient-greece-making-sculpture-their.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-2595182760239669273Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:18:00 +00002014-12-17T15:18:15.589+00:00Ancient GreeceAxis AgeThe Axis AgeThe culture of the classical Greeks is justly renowned. But it was far from a unique flowering of enlightenment in an era of despotic darkness. It was one part of a larger story.<br /><br />A few hundred years from around 800 to 200 BCE witnessed a major re-evaluation of the Bronze Age legacy across human civilisation. Four great cultural centres in particular laid spiritual and philosophical foundations that have profoundly influenced human society to the present day: ancient Israel, classical Greece, Buddhist India and Confucian China.<br /><br /><b>Greece </b>produced the poetry of Homer, the philosophy of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates and Aristotle; Platonism would become a major influence on Western thought, including Christianity, for centuries. <br /><br />In <b>India</b>, a prodigious blooming of intellectual and spiritual life produced philosophers including atheists and materialists among their number; the 6th–5th century BCE (the dates are disputed) brought us the teachings of the Buddha; in the 6th century BCE Jainism was founded; Hindu philosophy produced the <i>Upanishads</i> and in the 5th–2nd century BCE the <i>Bhagavad Gita</i> as part of the epic <i>Mahabharata</i>.<br /><br />In <b>China</b>, Confucius (551–479 BCE) and his followers produced the <i>Analects</i>, and the founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu (traditionally 6th century BCE), produced the <i>Tao Te Ching </i>(or <i>Daodejing</i>)<i>. </i>These have been the most widely read and studied texts in China.<br /><br />In <b>Palestine</b>, the great Hebrew prophets – Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah – laid the foundations of the Abrahamic religions, producing the canonical texts of the Hebrew scriptures.<br /><br />And we should add that in <b>Persia</b>, possibly around the 7th–6th centuries BCE, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) founded a philosophy and monotheistic religion that survives to this day. <br /><br />These currents of thought, giving us the first real classics of literature, seem to have arisen more or less independently, all of them asking very modern questions about the nature of reality and humanity’s place in it. It is striking that so many seminal figures were alive at the same time and many could even have met each other. Clearly, humanity in this period was bringing traditional practices and beliefs into question and speculating with great creativity about how to conceive and change the world. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers described this as the Axis or Axial Age: “the point most overwhelmingly fruitful in fashioning humanity” [1] – the axis or hinge upon which world history turned. <br /><br /><b>Merlin Donald on theoretic culture</b><br /><br />Over a space of few centuries humanity experienced a leap to a new level of intellectual sophistication. So what was happening here?<br /><br />An insight into this phase of human civilisation was proposed by the Canadian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald in his book <i>Origins of the Modern Mind</i>. Donald argued that human cognition had passed through three broad stages. Early humans made a transition from the ‘episodic’ cognition of animals to a ‘mimetic’ stage, characteristic of <i>Homo erectus</i>, which features gesture and non-verbal communication. The next transition, concluding with our species, <i>Homo sapiens</i>, was the ‘mythic’, which featured language and narrative thought. The final stage was the ‘theoretic’, representing the emergence of institutionalised, theoretical thought. This development depended upon the expansive use of external memory storage, which in most cases requires writing. Instead of relying upon oral culture and upon human biological memory, human culture invented written archives, as well as the other existing ways of recording our ideas such as monuments and works of art.<br /><br />Put into Donald’s terms, the Axis Age was the period of human history in which mimetic and mythic culture was joined by the theoretic. This was a cultural rather than a biological change, and it was profound. Literacy had been invented much earlier, but only now did humanity develop <i>a truly literate cultur</i>e. To put it simply, we shifted from oral tradition to libraries. External memory storage changed the way humans approached reality and its attendant puzzles such as religion, perception and society. Taking the Greeks as his example, Donald writes:<br /><br /><blockquote>Our concern here is not so much with the history of science or philosophy per se as with the cognitive framework that enabled such accelerated change. How had the structure of human thought process changed? The answer appears to be at least partly that, in the ancient Greeks, all of the essential symbolic inventions were in place for the first time. The evolution of writing was complete; the Greeks had the first truly effective phonetic system of writing, so successful that it has not really been improved since. They also possessed advanced systems of numeration and geometric graphing. Astronomy had advanced considerably under the Babylonians, and the Greeks were aware of that body of knowledge, as they were of Egyptian mathematics. Moreover, their society was open, intensely competitive, and sufficiently wealthy that education went beyond the immediately pragmatic.<br /><br />The key discovery that the Greeks made seems to have been a combinatorial strategy… In effect, the Greeks were the first to fully exploit the new cognitive architecture that had been made possible by visual symbolism.[2]</blockquote><br />For the Phoenicians, writing was mostly a mercantile tool; in Greece, every educated male could read or write. The Greeks <i>externalised </i>their speculation upon reality through the widespread use of literature, which stored ideas in a more reliable and permanent form than was possible under the oral tradition. Written opinions on the natural world, law, sculpture, etc could be placed into the public domain to be analysed, discussed and improved upon, even after their originators had died. The Greeks “founded the process of externally coded cognitive exchange and discovery” (Donald), using external memory storage to create a collective social memory. Greek culture stepped out of the oral tradition dominant during Homer’s time and began the journey that culminated in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria">Library of Alexandria</a>.<br /><br />Although, because of a particular combination of elements, this process was perhaps most intense in Greece (their 5th century BCE heyday pivoting in the very centre of the Axis Age), it produced a systematic inquiry into the nature of things <i>in four major centres of world culture</i>. It did not spring up fully formed, it was uneven, and it drew heavily upon earlier innovations; nonetheless the Axis Age was not a historical coincidence but a fundamental cultural shift. This shift to libraries was much more significant than the modern age’s great ‘information’ innovation, namely the internet. <br /><br />It is true that classical Greece produced some of the greatest achievements of the ancient world. But anyone who wishes to claim it as the single, direct ancestor of the West, or as a brilliant moment of uniquely European enlightenment, is required to ignore great swathes of historical context. He or she must become, as Edward Said put it:<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">someone who wants to make ‘civilisations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history.[3] </blockquote><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes">[1] Karl Jaspers, <i>The Origin and Goal of History</i> (1949). </span><br />[2] Merlin Donald, <i>Origins of the Modern Mind</i> (1991).<br />[3] Edward Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’ (<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/clash-ignorance">in <i>The Nation</i></a>, 2001). Said is commenting here on Huntington’s <i>The Clash of Civilisations</i>, but the principle applies.<br /><span class="footnotes"> </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/RPz5rpWIXb0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/RPz5rpWIXb0/the-axis-age.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-axis-age.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-1337072902331933589Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:47:00 +00002013-03-31T18:04:27.558+01:00Ancient GreeceAncient Greece: legacy to the WestClassical Greek culture has long been interpreted in the West [1] as the beginning of European civilisation. There is no doubt that Classical Greece was one of the great episodes in world culture. But it was not, of course, single in nature. Spread across the Mediterranean, conditioned by and conditioning other cultures, it was a complex phenomenon which archaeology is still piecing together.<br /><br />Greece’s role as a spiritual ancestor is usually taken for granted in Western states, and on a certain level this is uncontroversial. It is written on the very streets in buildings like the Capitol in Washington, DC. However, the relationship was neither linear nor continual. As the historian Michael Wood observed:<br /><br /><blockquote>Should we even view Greece as part of the West? The question may seem perverse, but where a Muslim scholar in tenth-century Baghdad would unquestionably have seen himself as the intellectual heir of classical Hellenism, the idea may never have occurred to a tenth-century scribe in England. She would have been familiar with some of its stories and myths; indebted too to the great patristic legacy in Greek; but she would hardly have thought herself its heir. Israel and Rome loomed far larger in her imagination.[2]</blockquote><br />We mentioned <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/grace-in-aegean-art-of-minoans.html">in an earlier post</a> that Minoan Crete should be seen not as the first ‘European’ civilisation so much as the westernmost expression of a development that began in the east. Ancient Greece occupied a similarly ambiguous position. The origins of Classical Greek culture can be traced back to the Near East and Egypt, partly via the Minoans and Mycenae, partly through their own direct contacts – early Greek sculpture for example is highly derivative of the Egyptian style. The Greeks owed a great deal to the Phoenicians, a Semitic culture from the coast of modern-day Lebanon, from whom they learnt to use an alphabet and to share other ideas, in sites like Al-Mina on the coast of modern Syria. The Ionian Greeks – inhabiting the colonies on the west coast of modern-day Turkey and in direct contact with Asia – benefited especially from their contact with Eastern ideas. It is true that the Greeks assimilated and transformed this cultural traffic to produce their own distinct, revolutionary culture. But as far as the Greeks do represent the beginning of Western civilisation, this means that the modern West, which is relatively very recent, ultimately finds its ancestry in the East. To draw a line at around the 8th century BCE on the Greek peninsula is somewhat arbitrary.<br /><br />By 400 BCE Greek culture was already declining under the pressure of constant internecine war. As Wood points out:<br /><br /><blockquote>Greece never united, remaining instead a land of warring city states, and in the mid-fourth century they fell to the brutal and vigorous Macedonians from the north. With that, Athens lost for good its cultural eminence which passed to the great Hellenistic foundations in Asia and North Africa, the powerhouses of a multi-racial empire which spread from the Balkans to India. <i>It was the ideals of this Hellenistic Age, adapted by the Romans, which would be the first shapers of the Western tradition</i> [my italics].</blockquote><br />The identification of Greece as the birthplace of European civilisation was an invention of the Renaissance, when the early bourgeoisie was looking for legitimacy for its own secular, scientific, individualistic and imperialist worldview. In the Greeks they saw a certain correspondence of interests in the study of the natural world, realism in the arts, etc. But even then, Greek culture was seen through the mediation of Rome. It was really the Romans who laid down the foundations for the last two millennia of culture in Europe and its offshoots. It is no accident that bourgeois revolutionary France and the United States took inspiration from the Roman Republic, not democratic Greece; the model for their senates was Roman. <br /><br />There are very practical reasons for this. The Roman legacy was one of organisation, administration, and importantly – beginning with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in about 312 AD – Christianity. The Roman policy of winning over sections of the ruling classes in the conquered territories created a culture that looked to Roman models even when the Romans had gone. For example, when in 800AD Charlemagne united most of western Europe for the first time since the Roman empire broke up four hundred years before, he was crowned Imperator Romanorum (‘Emperor of the Romans’), in Rome. <br /><br />Another reason is the limited availability of original Classical Greek culture. The works from antiquity unearthed during the Renaissance and later at Pompeii and Herculaneum were Hellenistic or Roman. Even today, a great deal of Greece’s artistic legacy exists only second-hand. The closest thing we have to a full-scale Greek painting, for example, is the ‘Alexander mosaic’ from Pompeii [3] – itself possibly a Hellenistic work shipped to Italy, or a Roman recreation; and works like Myron’s <i>Discobolus</i> sculpture survive only as Roman copies of original works of higher artistic quality. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that Europeans began to study the Classical Greeks directly. Even so, many now-famous Greek works were unknown to the West until relatively late: the Parthenon marbles weren’t brought to Britain until the early 19th century, and the ‘Riace bronzes’ were not fished from the sea until the 1970s. <br /><br />The rational, self-critical European who is supposedly the enlightened inheritor of the Greeks didn’t appear until <i>two thousand years</i> after the heyday of Classical Greece, having in the meantime been immersed in the legacy not of Greece but of Rome – and the often bloody superstitions of feudal Christianity.<br /><br />The line of continuity from ancient Greece to modernity was constructed by the bourgeoisie to add legitimacy to their own concerns. When reinventing the Greeks as spiritual ancestors, they concentrated upon the rational, scientific, humanist legacy rather than the bickering, superstition, sexism or blood-letting which were equally part of that culture. European history is a plentiful panorama from which subsequent generations can cherry-pick ideas and events which suit their ideological purposes, while ignoring other equally powerful ideas and events which don’t. One example of such an element of ancient art was its frankness about sexuality. The scale on which Greek and Roman art proudly sported genitalia and sex acts was utterly unacceptable to bourgeois Europe, which hid the offending objects from sight in museum vaults. Another is the participatory nature of Greek democracy – most modern bourgeois would be horrified by any proposal to allow direct votes for the working class about forty times a year, with terms of office lasting just one year, and the threat of exile hanging over politicians who earned popular disapproval. <br /><br />Theories that recruited the achievements of Greece and Rome to ‘European’ culture were also used to support racism and justify colonialism, by claiming a superior ancestry of civilisation for white cultures. As we’ve touched upon above, Eurocentrists conveniently forget that the West owes its own achievements to an intellectual legacy not just from the Aegean, but from Sumer (the 60-minute hour and the invention of writing), Phoenicia (the alphabet) and Islam (Arabic numerals). Persia, the cartoon villain of ancient Greek history, gave us chess and backgammon, algebra and the medicinal use of alcohol [4]. <br /><br />In short, to understand ancient Greece we must also understand the wider trends of human culture at the time. For that reason the next post will place Greece in context, as one part of a seminal period in human history.<br /><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes">[1] By ‘the West’ I mean the dominant cultures of Western Europe and their offshoots in North America and elsewhere. Dating from the Renaissance, they may be identified as Christian, capitalist and materialist.<br /> [2] Michael Wood, <i>Legacy: A Search for the Origins of Civilisation</i> (1999).<br /> [3] The original may be a work mentioned by Pliny the Elder that depicted Alexander battling Darius, painted by Philoxenos of Eretria from the 4th century BCE.<br /> [4] Anyone interested in Europe’s debt to other cultures will find M. Shahid Alam</span><span class="footnotes"><span class="footnotes">’</span>s ‘<a href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KK06Ak01.html">How Eurocentric is Your Day?</a>’ (2009) very interesting.<br /> </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/tObg6mn6o6A" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/tObg6mn6o6A/ancient-greece-legacy-to-west.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/ancient-greece-legacy-to-west.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-3663248934796318454Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:04:00 +00002013-03-07T11:28:25.744+00:00Ancient GreeceAncient Greece: EconomyThe advent of iron was a revolutionary forward step for human culture, allowing for increases in productivity. Iron was more durable than bronze, and iron tools improved agricultural efficiency; it was also abundant, and therefore cheaper. This was technology for the masses, becoming widespread in a way that the more expensive bronze could not. This social surplus helped make possible the building of new empires in Persia, China and India.<br /><br />Although we think of Greece through its famous cities such as Athens, Sparta and Corinth, the dominant sector of the ancient economy was agriculture. As Perry Anderson explained:<br /><br /><blockquote>The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners… Their income derived from corn, oil and wine – the three great staples of the Ancient World, produced on estates and farms outside the perimeter of the physical city itself. Within it, manufactures remained few and rudimentary.[1]</blockquote><br />This is not to say that urban trade was insignificant – in fact, it could make a decisive difference in a world dominated by agriculture. The key to trade for the ancient Greeks was the Mediterranean. It was far cheaper to ship goods across the sea than to transport it across land, and water gave the predominantly coastal Greek cities access to trade from Spain to Syria. This made possible an urban prosperity far more concentrated than the agricultural hinterlands, and dependent upon the great inland sea. Anderson concludes: “The Mediterranean, in other words, provided the necessary geographical setting for Ancient civilisation.”<br /><br />From the 6th century BCE, the foundations were laid for classical Greek civilisation. Coinage, colonisation, population growth and competitive trade helped create the ‘tyrants’ who played such an important part in the class struggles that broke the aristocracy’s grip on power.<br /><br />One of the concessions the tyrants made to the masses was the breaking up of aristocratic land monopolies, which was popular with farmers but limited Greek agriculture to the small to medium scale. Democracy also had a curtailing effect upon the power of the big landowners to exploit the citizenry. But there was a way to compensate for this cramping of productivity.<br /><br /><b>Slavery</b><br /><br />Class society was the means by which human beings massively increased their overall productivity and standard of living. The price for this greater material wellbeing was the division of people into classes according to their economic role, groupings that usually determined their entire lives. The limited productivity of ancient agriculture and industry could be increased by the gross exploitation of a section of the labour force – slavery.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCzK7bNVNZU/UTh1utA0oRI/AAAAAAAAAug/PDccqyGAEcw/s1600/amphora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="238" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCzK7bNVNZU/UTh1utA0oRI/AAAAAAAAAug/PDccqyGAEcw/s320/amphora.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Olive-gathering. Agriculture was a common use for <br />slave labour. 6th century BCE amphora by the <br />Antimenes painter.</td></tr></tbody></table>It appears that slavery existed in many ancient cultures, but it is a complex phenomenon. It was not usually full-blown – i.e. human beings as chattel property – and played a marginal economic role, most production being based on the peasant-farmer. Slaves assigned to palaces, crafts or administrative work could actually enjoy a higher status and standard of living than toilers in the fields. Ancient Greece by contrast seems to have been the first culture to transform slavery into a mode of production. Slaves, who were mostly acquired as prisoners of war, worked the fields, served in households and laboured in construction, providing much of the labour power that fuelled Greek quarries, workshops and shipyards. In a few cases, slaves managed to buy their freedom, but slaves’ lives were normally hard, especially in the mines, and they had no rights whatsoever. The city of Sparta was unusual in keeping an entire population enslaved – the Messenian <i>helots</i> – though it may be more correct to see them as oppressed peasant labour rather than chattel property. <br /><br />It is impossible to estimate exactly the number and proportion of slaves in the population, since no reliable records were made at the time. In Athens, slaves probably accounted for about one quarter of the population. The Greek economy never depended exclusively upon slave labour, but what matters is not numbers but the contribution slavery made to the production of the social surplus. As G.E.M. de Ste Croix argued, it was not that the <i>bulk of production</i> was done by slaves; in fact the combined production of various forms of free labour exceeded that of unfree labour. The significant thing is that the propertied class extracted the greater part of its <i>surplus</i> from unfree labour. In his own precise formulation:<br /><br /><blockquote>I think it would not be technically correct to call the Greek (and Roman) world ‘a <i>slave </i>economy’; but I should not raise any strong objection if anyone else wished to use that expression, because, as I shall argue, the propertied classes extorted the bulk of their surplus from the working population by means of unfree labour, in which slavery, in the strict technical sense, played at some periods a dominant role and was always a highly significant factor.[2]</blockquote><br />Agricultural slavery formed the economic basis of the Greek ruling class, allowing the nobility to congregate in the sophisticated towns. No wonder they saw slave ownership as one of the essentials of a civilised life! The surplus produced by slave labour allowed privileged Greeks the leisure to contemplate existence or to compose verse. Although slavery is a repugnant idea today, it was one of the foundations of Greek art. It was an unpleasant fact of life that slavery and democracy formed a dialectic; slavery helped to define liberty. And both helped to define culture.<br /><br /><b>The Athenian empire</b><br /><br />The richest city state in the Greek world was Athens, whose wealth was built upon sea trade and the silver discovered at around 483 BCE at Laureion, which it mined using thousands of slaves.<br /><br />From 499 BCE, the Greek city states were confronted by a military threat from Persia, and formed, with an uncharacteristic unity of purpose, an alliance that won a series of victories at land and sea. In 478 BCE they launched the Delian League – taking its name from its treasury on the ‘neutral’ island of Delos – to organise the collective defence of the Greek cities. The allies paid money into this fund every year, and collective security helped expand trade and prosperity. However, as the Persian threat receded, Athens’ leadership role became increasingly oppressive. When Naxos and Thasos attempted to withdraw from the alliance, the Athenian navy was sent to punish them. The pretence was dropped in 454 BCE when the treasury was moved to the Parthenon, which became more of a bank than a temple as tribute poured into the city. The member cities of the league had to pay Athens every year in her own currency, the silver owl, forcing them to buy Athenian produce to get the required coinage. Athens had created an empire.<br /><br />This development had its own logic. Perry Anderson points out that slavery militated against any dramatic improvement of technique: slaves have no incentive to be more productive and slave labour degraded the status of labour in general. The main means of expansion in the ancient world therefore was a sideways, geographic one.<br /><br /><blockquote>Classical civilisation was in consequence inherently colonial in character: the cellular city-state invariably reproduced itself, in phases of ascent, by settlement and war.</blockquote><br />It is one of the contradictions of Greek democracy that Athens practiced democracy and sponsored it in other cities, yet became an overbearing imperial power in the Aegean.<br /><br />Part of what made an Athenian empire possible was the trade goods flowing in from around the Mediterranean, making the Athenian port, Piraeus, a huge commercial centre. Athens now ruled a population of two million, receiving tribute from more than 170 states, and was the biggest importer of grain in the ancient world.<br /><br /> The Athenian imperial system would not survive the plunder, plague and massacres of the Peloponnesian War. But at its exuberant height in the 5th century BCE, Athens was not only rich in money but in ideas. Its cash paid for more triremes, but it also subsidised culture and public buildings. The city became the centre for the tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes; the comedy of Aristophanes; the history of Herodotus; and the philosophy of Anaxagoras and Socrates. Its most powerful symbol was the temple complex on the Acropolis hilltop that included the Parthenon.<br /><br /> The historian Bettany Hughes described the effect of such wealth:<br /><br /><blockquote>Athens was able to beautiful itself. Walls, monuments and life-sculptures were erected. Aphrodite’s hoary, soot-blacked husband, Hephaestus, was given a new temple overlooking the Agora. In the city’s spanking-new Odeion, citizens enjoyed public cultural performances and contests, male-voice choirs fifty to 1000-strong competed here; new clothes were bought for performers and for the gods that their music honoured, and Athens’ snaking walls crept four miles further south to Piraeus. Pericles’ building programme was silhouetted on the Athenian skyline: the Propylaia, and perhaps too in his mind the glimmer of a plan for the Erechtheion – a kind of holy-hotel for many gods – famously buttressed by staunch caryatids. And, above all, Athena’s Parthenon: decorated green, blue, gold – dazzling like a peacock. Athena Parthenos, gilded and glowing with crystals and hippopotamus ivory, towered 39 feet high within the temple. Her gold clothes and accessories weighed 120lb, her skin gleamed, and on her outstretched palm perched a 6.5-foot high statue of Nike, the goddess of victory.[3]</blockquote><br />Hughes’ description demonstrates vividly why a booming economy was another of the pre-requisites for ancient Greek art.<br /><br /> <hr /><span class="footnotes">[1] Perry Anderson, <i>Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism</i> (1974).<br />[2] G.E.M. de Ste Croix, <i>The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World</i> (1981). </span><br /><span class="footnotes">[3] Bettany Hughes, <i>The Hemlock Cup</i> (2010). </span><br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/gt95f4HPG64" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/gt95f4HPG64/ancient-greece-economy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/ancient-greece-economy.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-8696761867727780159Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:21:00 +00002013-05-11T13:28:40.106+01:00Ancient GreeceAncient Greece: Democracy and individualismThe first foundation of Greek culture that we will look at is its politics.<br /><br />In the sixth century BCE, Greece launched an unprecedented political experiment in direct democracy, with its epicentre in the city-state of Athens. This revolution had huge consequences for Greek art.<br /><br /><b>Democracy</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZEcyKwLdLG4/USiWz8V5N-I/AAAAAAAAArc/2CnrwgHdtsM/s1600/map-of-archaic-greece.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="274" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZEcyKwLdLG4/USiWz8V5N-I/AAAAAAAAArc/2CnrwgHdtsM/s320/map-of-archaic-greece.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>Map: <a href="http://www.usu.edu/">http://www.usu.edu</a></i><br /><br />The origin of the small-scale, isolated Greek <i>polis </i>or city state lay in the fragmentation of Mycenaean culture following <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/crisis-and-revolution-from-bronze-to.html">the Bronze Age collapse</a>. Typically, the <i>polis </i>was a fortified town surrounded by land and villages. Even before the expansionism of Alexander the Great, there were about 1500 city-states scattered across the coast from Spain and France to the Black Sea and Asia Minor. Few of them had a population of more than about 20,000, and the average was nearer 1000. Each was jealous of its independence and had its own constitution, leading to a great diversity of religious practice, culture and customs.<br /><br />The small size of these Greek cities made their aristocracies more vulnerable, bringing the gulf between the rich and poor into a more intimate light. The privileges of the kings and their families were resented by those whose wealth was based upon the revival of trade. The new rich, or oligarchs, in many cities overthrew the monarchy to establish republics which themselves became subject to coups by popular ruling class leaders known as ‘tyrants’. The tyrants drew political power from mobilising the masses by making concessions on land and building public works, and in Athens and elsewhere this created the political opportunity for the first breakthrough for the masses in the class struggle of antiquity.<br /><br />The first steps towards democracy were taken in 594 BCE by Solon, an oligarch who introduced reforms designed to steer a course between debt-ridden peasants and disenfranchised traders on one hand, and the aristocracy on the other. But the decisive change came nearly a century later when the pro-aristocratic Isagoras invited the Spartan army into Athens to help push out his reform-minded rival Kleisthenes. In response, Kleisthenes mobilised the masses, who laid siege to the Spartans and forced them out. The oppressed classes had acted, for the first time in recorded history, as a political agent.<br /><br />Solon’s constitution was reformed. To break down traditional clan affiliations, citizens would now register by their place of residence and were thus placed on a more equal footing. The officials of legislative bodies were now chosen by lottery instead of being appointed by class or clan.<br /><br />Democracy, which survived for about 200 years, was an astonishing development. An estimated 40,000 citizens of the city of Athens (out of a population of perhaps 250,000) now had a social power unprecedented in the ancient world. This was a limited suffrage compared to today, but it was a revolution compared to the despotisms of the Bronze and Iron Ages. Nor was it the shallow democracy of modern bourgeois states, whose electorate gets to vote once every five years or so for ‘representatives’ from a selection of ruling class factions. When the Assembly (<i>ekklesia</i>), the main legislative body, met on a hillside near the Acropolis, 6,000 citizens were needed for the meeting to be quorate. These citizens had a direct say in the city’s affairs, not just voting on issues put to them but deciding what the issues were. Greek democracy therefore was participatory, not representative. Freedom of expression (<i>parrhesia </i>or ‘to speak frankly’) meant that any citizen could speak in the assembly regardless of social class. Checks and punishments for elected officials included, in the worst cases, exile for ten years (known as ostracism).<br /><br />Democracy encouraged a plurality of views, a dialectic that encouraged public debate and transformed intellectual life. Schools of philosophy arose from the desire to learn the nature of truth, the best ways to organise society, and the nature of the gods – if gods even existed at all. This process was assisted by the geography of the region. Unlike the civilisations in China and India, built in great river valleys and immense plains, land was scarce in mountainous Greece. As a sea-trading people based in a series of mostly coastal towns and colonies, the Greeks would have encountered a great variety of religions, philosophies, languages, and arts. An exposure to different worldviews can encourage, in the right conditions, an inquisitive mind: which, if any, of these discourses is actually correct? Unlike more centralised seafaring cultures such as the Carthaginians and Phoenicians, the Greeks could debate these things with a rare freedom. Some of these views were startling: including atheism (e.g. Diagoras) and materialism (e.g. Epicurus and Democritus).<br /><br />Democracy caused consternation among privileged Athenians. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and playwrights such as Aeschylus and Aristophanes, are celebrated today as amongst the greatest products of Greek culture. But the ruling class, the leaders of Greece’s philosophical and literary life included, resented the constraints placed upon it by democracy, and, when they could, attempted to overthrow it. Socrates for example was associated with a group of conservative intellectuals who attempted to overthrow democracy in the late 5th century BCE. Yet it was only because intellectual life in Athens was so open and critical that a figure like Socrates could exist at all. Athens’ most brilliant cultural figures represented both a reaction against democracy and its highest product.<br /><br />After Greece was conquered by the Romans, Athenian democracy died out. Democracy was not seen again in Europe until the advent of the bourgeoisie, who revived it 2000 years later, in their own forms, for their own reasons. <br /><br /><b>Individualism</b><br /><br />Unlike a great empire like Egypt, these relatively small, self-contained and democratic communities had no monarchy, bureaucracy and priest caste to insist upon a unity of cultural conventions. Artistic production was still dominated by the ruling class, but the ruling classes were more localised, less monolithic and, in democratic cities like Athens, constrained by the genuine political power of the masses.<br /><br />This conjunction of elements brought something new to culture, in fact one of the most powerful ideas in history: a thoroughgoing sense of <b>individualism</b>. Each citizen of the <i>polis </i>(provided they were neither female nor slaves) could make an individual contribution to society, and assert their own particular views in competition with those of others. An individual, heroic human being could take control of their own destiny – human beings were the measure of all things. The potent inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘know yourself’ (<i>gnōthi seauton</i>), was the slogan of a society that recognised the inner life of the individual like never before.<br /><br />It is revealing that in the ancient world, it was highly unusual for artists to put their names to their work or become celebrated. In Greece, however, even the creators of that mass-produced art form, pottery, are recognisable by their individual style and sometimes sign their work. The Greeks consistently proclaim their identity as individual artists, lending history an unprecedented mass of named writers, architects, dramatists, poets and painters. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDB5aLsRm1U/USiX0h3O_iI/AAAAAAAAAro/MmQ6JJlb0KQ/s1600/archaic-smile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HDB5aLsRm1U/USiX0h3O_iI/AAAAAAAAAro/MmQ6JJlb0KQ/s200/archaic-smile.jpg" width="146" /></a></div><i>A statue comes to life: head of a kouros, 6th century BCE. Photo: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tetraktys">Tetraktys</a>.&nbsp;</i><br /><br />Let us briefly take the example of sculpture, for which Greece is particularly famed. (We will post on this topic in more detail later.) Influenced by individualism, the Greeks began to break down the rigid conventions they initially imitated from Egyptian art. Greek sculptors gradually became interested in representing particular, lifelike human beings, and to this end sought to depict what they <i>saw</i>, rather than what they had been told or thought they knew. Statues became enlivened by the so-called ‘archaic smile’, anatomy became more realistic, and poses more subtle and elastic.<br /><br />The dialectic of individualism and scientific inquiry encouraged artists to look again at nature to question tradition and find new ways of seeing. Of course, despite their modern reputation for rationalism the Greeks worshipped an extended family of gods and goddesses and their lives were dominated by festivals, sacrifices and religious rites. This cannot be divorced from their art – almost all of which is inspired by mythology – any more than Greek democracy can be fully understood without its constraints of sexism and slavery. But there was now more space within culture for artists to align with radical political and scientific ideas. Born out of this contradiction, classical Greek art was both ideal and real, typical and individual: it sought a <i>balance </i>between a delight in nature and a very traditional desire for order and proportion.<br /><br />Even after her independence and democracy were long lost, Athens continued for several more centuries as a centre of education for philosophy, rhetoric and logic. But classical Greek art grew from a combination of elements, some stronger than others. Democracy, and the individualism with which it is entwined, was one of the strongest. It is unlikely to be an accident that the crushing of democracy, under the Macedonians and then the Romans, was followed by the fading of Greek art’s revolutionary flair.<br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/C67wIjWMhDk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/C67wIjWMhDk/ancient-greece-democracy-and.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/ancient-greece-democracy-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-7511428621707841839Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:27:00 +00002013-05-11T13:27:44.440+01:00Ancient GreeceThe origins of ancient Greek artIn ancient Greece, an art developed that was later to be seen as a seminal cultural achievement, above all by Western civilisation. When Marx wrote that the ancient Greek arts “are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal” [1], he was endorsing a consensus that has only recently begun to be reassessed. It was summed up by Percy Shelley when he wrote: <br /><br /><blockquote>We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece... we might still have been savages and idolaters. [2]</blockquote> <br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0nUT-Fz_UbA/USF-t0w2fAI/AAAAAAAAAq4/Zrmpd-2d4ZU/s1600/apollo_belvedere.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0nUT-Fz_UbA/USF-t0w2fAI/AAAAAAAAAq4/Zrmpd-2d4ZU/s320/apollo_belvedere.jpg" /></a><i>The Apollo Belvedere. For hundreds of years this statue was regarded by European culture as one of the greatest achievements of ancient Greek art. Today it is believed to be a Roman copy of a lost bronze original. Photo: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wknight94">Wknight94</a>.</i> <br /><br />It is unhelpful to repeat art history clichés about ‘the genius of the Greeks’. Is the Greeks’ reputation justified? Are they really the founders of Western culture? Does their art have something that the art of their contemporaries doesn’t? To find answers we have to look for the concrete historical developments that can explain why particular peoples, at a particular time, achieve particular things.<br /><br />The next few posts will attempt answers to those questions. I will tend to concentrate upon Athens, not because other Greek cities made no contribution, but because we have far more data for Athens, and because it was the epicentre of the ancient Greek world.<br /><br />Readers may want to begin by revisiting my previous posts around the topic of ancient Greece: <br />• <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/rise-of-ancient-greece.html">The rise of ancient Greece</a><br />• <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/marx-and-greek-classics.html">Marx and the Greek classics</a> <br />• <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-iliad.html">The Iliad</a><br />• <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/thersites.html">Thersites</a><br />• <a href="http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/is-this-sparta.html">Is this Sparta?</a><br /><br /><hr />[1] <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/appx1.htm</a><br />[2] Percy Shelley, Preface to ‘Hellas’ (1822).<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/nqrPBUoPC8w" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/nqrPBUoPC8w/the-origins-of-ancient-greek-art.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-origins-of-ancient-greek-art.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-6277585870465843534Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:57:00 +00002013-02-10T01:00:00.744+00:00100,000 page viewsIt is a blogging custom to congratulate yourself when you achieve 100,000 page views. So here I am, congratulating myself!<br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/9aNKIA3s9g4" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/9aNKIA3s9g4/100000-page-views.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/02/100000-page-views.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-2241500785857363689Sun, 03 Feb 2013 23:37:00 +00002013-02-03T23:50:40.697+00:00FilmVenezuelaVenezuelan film industry beginning to flourish<i>Reproduced from <a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7662">venezuelanalysis.com</a>, 1 Feb 2013.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>By Ewan Robertson – Correo del Orinoco International</b><br /><br /><div class="print-content">With community film showings and the opening of a new movie theatre, this Monday 28 January Venezuela celebrated its National Day of Cinema.<br /><br />The day marks 116 years since the first fragments of Venezuelan film were shown in Maracaibo in 1897, and comes as the national film industry is experiencing a renaissance.<br /><br />According to figures in the Venezuelan film industry, this year between 28 and 30 locally made feature length films will be premiered, an increase on the 20 shown last year and an average of 15 over the last few years <br /><br />Jose Antonio Valera, president of the Venezuelan government’s body for the promotion of national cinema, the Villa del Cine Foundation, said on Monday that so many Venezuelan films had never been premiered in one year.<br /><br />“We can say that from this week every time a Venezuelan goes to the cinema they will have two or three options from national cinema to choose from, apart from the hegemonic options. This is unique and makes us very happy,” he said in an interview with public television VTV.<br /><br />One of the new Venezuelan movies to be premiered this year is “Breaking the Silence” which deals with structural abuse against disabled people. “The film tries to break the chains of daily abuse,” said director Andres Rodriguez, who added that up to now disabled people hadn’t played an important role in national cinema.<br /><br />Another of the films, produced by the Anaco Audiovisual Community, will be the first community-made feature length film in Venezuela.<br /><br /><b>The fall and rise of Venezuelan Cinema&nbsp;</b><br /><br />The rise in the quantity and profile of Venezuelan films comes after a spectacular collapse in the industry in the 1990s.<br /><br />In the “golden decade” of the 1980s, a peak was reached in 1986 when over 4 million people went to see nationally produced films.<br /><br />Yet in the 1990s, according to national cinema spokespersons, a mixture of economic crisis, neoliberal policies and industry instability caused a collapse in Venezuelan cinema. This reached a disastrous low in 1994, when only 77,000 box office seats were filled by national productions.<br /><br />According to Victor Lucker of the national private distributor Cine Amazonia Films, governments of that period contributed to the decline, as “there weren’t clear policies” towards the industry.<br /><br />However this trend has been reversed in recent years, in part due to policies adopted by the Chavez government. The reform to the Cinema Law in 2005 and the establishment of the Financing and Promotion of Cinema Fund boosted the increased production of Venezuelan film and gave a concomitant stability to the national industry.<br /><br />Meanwhile the government founded the Villa del Cine in 2006, complimenting the already existing National Autonomous Centre of Cinematography (CNAC), to support and directly participate in the production of Venezuelan film.<br /><br />These efforts have played a key role in the industry’s current renaissance. Of the 28–30 new Venezuelan movies to be shown this year, 22 enjoy the participation of the Villa del Cine.<br /><br />Villa del Cine president Valera commented on Monday that “the fruits of a strong, coherent and sustained policy are being harvested, that aims to make Venezuela a player in the cultural and cinematic spheres”.<br /><br />The Venezuelan government is also in the process of opening a network of new cinemas through which both Venezuelan movies and a range of world film not usually available in commercial cinemas will be shown. Venezuela’s Experimental University of the Arts will participate in both the programming and policies of this alternative cinema network.<br /><br />Due to greater industry stability and the establishment of a new worker’s fund, film industry workers also enjoy greater labour benefits than before, said Victor Lucker, such as social insurance and vacation plans for kids.<br /><br />Along with the greater number of movies being produced, box office figures for national cinema have also shown a resurgence. In 2012 over 2 million Venezuelans went to see nationally produced titles, not counting street projections and attendance at community theatres.<br /><br />As the popularity of Venezuelan cinema seems set to continue rising, government and industry figures are also looking to make a larger regional and global impact.<br /><br />“We live in a moment of splendour for [Venezuelan] cinema that obliges us to be ever better… and to grow in this sense. We have a great commitment with the audience we’ve recovered,” said Lucker.<br /></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/r8mr4jZfGVA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/r8mr4jZfGVA/venezuelan-film-industry-beginning-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/02/venezuelan-film-industry-beginning-to.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-4249298234651139448Sun, 03 Feb 2013 23:36:00 +00002013-02-03T23:49:33.660+00:00FilmVenezuelaChávez opens Venezuelan film studio to counter Hollywood<i>Reproduced from <a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1777">venezuelanalysis.com</a>.<b> </b>First published on 6 June 2006, so a bit old, but I thought it might complement the post that follows.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>By Pablo Navarrete – Venezuelanalysis.com&nbsp;</b><br /><br />Saturday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez inaugurated a new film studio complex aimed at challenging what he called “Hollywood’s cultural dictatorship”.<br /><br />“Through [Hollywood’s films], [we are inoculated] with messages that don’t belong to our traditions, rather they weaken our culture and our morality,” said Chávez at the inauguration, according to the Venezuelan daily <i>Ultimas Noticias. </i>Chávez also accused Hollywood of portraying Latin Americans as violent criminals, thieves and drug traffickers and described the studio complex as a new weapon in Venezuela’s “cultural artillery” against U.S. cultural domination.<br /><br />The Film Villa Foundation,situated in Guarenas, near Caracas, received an initial Ministry of Culture investment of over $8.3 million, less than a tenth the amount spent on the average Hollywood movie.<br /><br />The first phase of the complex includes areas for production and post-production equipped with the latest technology, according to Venezuela’s Minister of Culture, Francisco Sesto, who also attended the inauguration.<br /><br />Sesto said that the government hoped the complex would provide a platform for the production of Venezuelan films and the purchase of independent films from abroad, including the United States. On average the Venezuelan film industry produces one film every four years, according to government figures.<br /><br />Angel Palacios, an award-winning Venezuelan independent film maker, told Venezuelanalysis.com, “During many years cinema production was limited to those people who had lots of money or the fortune to study abroad. In my opinion the creation of the Film Villa Foundation is a great step forward in the democratisation of cinema production herein Venezuela.” <br /><br />Sesto also announced that this year the government will inaugurate one hundred community halls for projecting digital videos. In November 2005, a new cinema law committed government funds to the development of the Venezuelan film industry.<br /><br />In a related initiative, last year the Venezuelan government provided majority funding for Telesur, a Spanish-language television channel launched to challenge news coverage provided by major corporate networks and to promote Latin American integration.<br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/SJ6XRVFoTlI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/SJ6XRVFoTlI/chavez-opens-venezuelan-film-studio-to.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2013/02/chavez-opens-venezuelan-film-studio-to.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-2976576931086112057Sat, 24 Nov 2012 10:00:00 +00002012-11-28T10:04:45.621+00:00LatuffPalestinePalestine<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lPOgu-U8cao/ULXfunEkUrI/AAAAAAAAApU/rs0eZHbThAY/s1600/latuff-gaza.gif" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lPOgu-U8cao/ULXfunEkUrI/AAAAAAAAApU/rs0eZHbThAY/s640/latuff-gaza.gif" width="420" /></a><br /><br />A fine image by cartoonist Carlos Latuff – you can see more here: <a href="http://latuffcartoons.wordpress.com/">http://latuffcartoons.wordpress.com</a>. This was drawn in 2009, but is sadly as relevant as ever. <br /><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/69stSV92RXY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/69stSV92RXY/palestine.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/11/palestine.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-3842274451041594228Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:31:00 +00002014-12-17T11:13:32.404+00:00Ancient GreeceFilmHomerIs this Sparta?<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qT4HXVQwSlU/TeKZyUBwPeI/AAAAAAAAAnk/pOKBiafjpyw/s1600/300-poster.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="300 film poster" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qT4HXVQwSlU/TeKZyUBwPeI/AAAAAAAAAnk/pOKBiafjpyw/s400/300-poster.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612217175305633250" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 400px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 271px;" /></a>Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller, the film <i>300</i> (released in 2006) interprets the events around the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE.<br /><br />When the Greek city states are threatened by an immense Persian army, King Leonidas of Sparta defies opposition at home and takes 300 hand-picked men to lead the Greek defence. His chosen spot is a narrow pass that will render ineffective the Persians’ huge numerical advantage.<br /><br />The story is framed by a narrator who turns out to be Dilios, a warrior sent home to tell his fellow Spartans, and ourselves, what has happened. The story therefore is being told second-hand and possibly embellished for effect, a device that gives the film licence to stray freely into fantasy.<br /><br /><i>300</i> is visually dramatic, but one-dimensional characters, shouty acting and a wearying parade of carnage mean its qualities mostly end there. Politically, too, the film is as sophisticated as a head-butt, glorifying militaristic white males with identikit six-packs as they defend freedom and other cherished ‘Western’ values from a decadent and barbarous Asiatic horde [1].<br /><br /><b>Reactionism in Sparta</b><br /><br />The audience is expected to root for the Spartans in this confrontation, but is given little or no reason to value what they stand for. In fact, their world seems repulsive.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WUtYm9K9MPI/UD8nRruZEOI/AAAAAAAAAo8/MrloGYwDolM/s1600/300-ephor.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ephor" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WUtYm9K9MPI/UD8nRruZEOI/AAAAAAAAAo8/MrloGYwDolM/s200/300-ephor.gif" height="150" title="Ephor" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>One of the Ephors</i></td></tr></tbody></table>The entire film reeks with distaste for disability and physical ‘imperfection’. Dilios observes in his narration that if a Spartan newborn was ‘small or puny, sickly or misshapen’, it was condemned to death. Nobody criticises this practice. The ephors – priests whose blessing is required by law before Sparta may go to war – are described as ‘<i>inbred</i> swine, more creature than man’. Their physical deformity is an indication of their corrupt nature, for the ephors are greedy, treacherous and use their position to exploit young women for sex. The army of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire">Achaemenid empire</a> is packed with disfigured soldiers and ogres. Another example is the Spartan exile Ephialtes, who follows the three hundred and begs Leonidas to let him join in the battle to prove his worth. Leonidas refuses because Ephialtes is a hunchback whose inability to fully raise his shield would create a weakness in the phalanx. Outraged by this rejection, Ephialtes switches his allegiance to the Persians, revealing a route through the pass in return for a uniform and sex with slave girls. This betrayal leads directly to the defeat and death of Leonidas and his men.<br /><br />The message from all this is clear: physical disability not only means you are unfit for service, it is synonymous with inferiority, slavery, treachery and evil – a corruption of the body manifesting a corruption of the soul. The ancient Greeks may have agreed with this. But we are not ancient Greeks.<br /><br />Just as distasteful is the open homophobia of the Spartan warriors. Leonidas dismisses the Athenians as ‘philosophers and boy-lovers’. The warrior Stelios, competing with his comrade to kill the most Persians, taunts him with ‘offering his backside to Thespians’. The Persians, including their king, Xerxes, are often portrayed as effete, wearing jewels and makeup as signs of decadence.<br /><br />There is a stark racial divide throughout the film. The Persians are dark-skinned and, rather like any Middle Eastern throng on a Western news report, are portrayed as an undisciplined rabble. The first casualty of the film is a black messenger kicked down a pit, the first of many black people put to the sword by the finely chiselled white Spartans. The Persian army is likened to a beast, in particular a fearsome wolf.<br /><br />On the Persian side, women appear only briefly as beautiful concubines, squirming seductively on the ground. Spartan women come out better than one might expect: Leonidas’s wife Gorgo is strong and proud, and displays her own heroic qualities when she pulls a sword on the wily ‘bad guy’ Theron and slays him before the Spartan council. When Xerxes threatens to enslave Sparta’s women, Leonidas warns him, ‘You don’t know our women.’ Historically, women seem to have enjoyed much greater freedom in Sparta than was usual in ancient Greece. But women in Persia also enjoyed greater freedoms than in most of ancient Greece, and this is ignored. Gorgo declares that Spartan women measure their worth as giving birth to ‘real men’, and is the only woman who merits a speaking part in a film dedicated to an orgy of male violence.<br /><br />And the violence is extreme and frequent. The title screen of <i>300</i> promises blood, and keeps the promise. Director Zack Snyder uses slow-motion sequences so we may enjoy the beauty of slaughter. Sprays of blood and severed limbs fly through the air and the Spartans whirl through the middle of it like ballet dancers, admirable for their perfection as killers. Violence has its place in cinema when used appropriately, but this is an aesthetic that would not be out of place in a Nazi propaganda film. It is accompanied on the Spartan side by a kind of locker room machismo. When thrash guitars burst out to accompany their onslaughts, one is reminded of the passages in Michael Moore’s <i>Fahrenheit 9/11</i> when US troops play heavy metal as a soundtrack to killing Iraqis. This is not accidental, because these Spartans are fantasy US marines in red cloaks, fighting to keep the world free... for eugenics, homophobia and Asian-bashing.<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GGRVwVS8vnI/TeKbWKKBahI/AAAAAAAAAns/v-wqWiCfI_k/s1600/300-movie-still.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="movie still from 300" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GGRVwVS8vnI/TeKbWKKBahI/AAAAAAAAAns/v-wqWiCfI_k/s320/300-movie-still.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612218890642876946" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 168px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a><i>The US marines stick it to the Iranians. Publicity still from</i> 300<i>. Credit: Warner Brothers.</i><br /><br />One might argue in the film’s defence that the story is narrated – the fantastical elements for example may represent Dilios’ elaborations on the story – and therefore perhaps should not be taken at face value. But at no point is the audience invited to doubt Dilios as a narrator, or to challenge his narrative. <br /><br />The main thing one can do with such a silly film is laugh at it, as many film reviewers have done. Peter Bradshaw [2] of the <i>Guardian</i> concluded for example that “no one could possibly take it seriously.” This is true as far as it goes. But however daft the film, its real interest for critics is the way it lays bare a particular thread of Western ideology.<br /><br /><b>The clash of civilisations</b><br /><br />The message of Snyder’s piece of nonsense is that the Battle of Thermopylae was a battle between an enlightened (white) West that celebrates freedom and reason, and a barbarous (black) East based on submission and decadence.<br /><br /><i>300</i> of course is not meant to be taken seriously as history. This is underlined by its extravagant use of fantasy: for example, Xerxes appears as a giant about nine feet tall, seated upon a throne that would sink any ship that tried to transport it. But it is often the weakest works of art that teach us most about a society’s preoccupations. <i>300</i> is a crass illustration of the thesis known as the ‘clash of civilisations’, whose best-known formulation appears in the book of that name by Samuel P. Huntington.<br /><br />Huntington contended that ‘the fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.’[3] But the theme is bigger than any single author. Broadly, it proposes that there is a fundamental historical clash between the ‘values’ of the West and the East, above all the Islamic world. It is no accident that this thesis has appeared in the post-Cold War period when imperialism is turning its military focus onto the Middle East. Imperialism’s version of Islam is well summed up in the words of Frank Miller himself, talking about ‘the enemy’ in a radio interview:<br /><br /><blockquote>For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbours were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.[4]</blockquote><br />Although the religion of Islam did not exist at the time of Thermopylae, Persia roughly corresponds to modern-day Iran and its empire embraced a great swathe of the Middle East. The film-makers strongly identify the Persians with Muslim stereotypes: they wear turbans and veils, and are angry and dark-skinned. By contrast, Leonidas sometimes appears Christ-like, most unambiguously in his final shot where he lies with arms spread (pierced with arrows like that other Christian icon, Saint Sebastian). The film was released at a time when US policy towards Iran was particularly belligerent, and the threat of an imperialist attack hangs over Iran still.<br /><br />The ‘clash of civilisations’ setting requires that the Persian empire must be represented as tyrannical. This approach is not limited to the frat-house world of <i>300</i>. In 2007, the historian Bettany Hughes repeated the refrain in a mainstream television documentary when commenting upon the Greeks’ victory at Salamis:<br /><br /><blockquote>All over the city [Athens] public monuments were set up eulogising the victory. The message was clear: Western democracy could, and should, triumph over Eastern tyranny. The schism between East and West had been set in stone.[5]</blockquote><br />Here Persia is casually labelled like a pantomime villain. Hughes should surely know that Persia was the first of the world’s great empires, comprising 5 million square kilometres and perhaps 10 million people. Persian rule usually meant minimal interference in daily life: regions were governed by satraps who collected taxes for the emperor, but kept relative autonomy and their local religious customs were respected. Slavery was in general <i>banned</i> in Persia – unlike in Greece! The empire behaved no more brutally than any other ancient empire, or indeed the Greeks themselves when tearing each other apart in the Peloponnesian War [6]. <br /><br />Sparta was no more ‘free’ than Persia. The film makes no mention for example of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots">helots</a>, who were kept in slavery so the Spartans might exploit the wealth of Messenia [7]; it was the need to oppress this great mass of slaves that prompted Sparta to develop its ferocious military system in the first place. Sparta, on the film’s evidence, is a nasty regime that kills children with disabilities, abuses those who survive, and scorns any softness or weakness. Even the Greek cities that did have democracy only granted it to a minority of citizens, and never to women. After the victories against the Persians, Athens created its own empire through the Delian League, imposing its authority over other Greeks and punishing cities that tried to assert independence.<br /><br />There’s no space to expose the full stupidity of the ‘clash of civilisations’ here. Suffice to say, it is misguided to identify the US or Iran too strongly with ancient Greece or Persia, or to try and impose slogans about democracy onto ancient history. The division into west and east would have made no sense to the ancients. Despite this, the battle of Thermopylae, and the Greek victories over Persia that followed, have long been held up by Western scholarship as moments of definition for the West. Here <i>300</i> resembles its plodding 1962 ancestor, <i>The 300 Spartans</i>, in which the Spartans again act as proxy Americans defending freedom against the hordes, in this instance, of eastern communism. Today the story has been updated for a new enemy.<br /><br />Why is there such fascination with the strategically insignificant engagement at Thermopylae, given that the battles of Salamis and Plataea were more decisive in throwing back the Persian invasions? Probably for the same reason that the Greek historian Herodotus grossly over-estimated Persian numbers at nearly two million. Salamis and Plataea have not been as fruitful for comic books, novels and movies because they capture much less vividly the ‘few against many’ symbolism attractive to a superpower ludicrously trying to present itself as a heroic underdog. The <i>real</i> relation of forces at present – a nuclear-armed military superpower and its allies attacking much weaker Third World states – lends itself very poorly to romanticisation. The situation at Thermopylae also lends itself to the racist image, familiar in fascist literature, of a small but superior global community of white people besieged by a vast rabble of black people. <br /><br />The ‘clash of civilisations’ is intellectual propaganda for a series of wars initiated by US imperialism in the Middle East. These wars are designed to win advantages for the declining superpower that it cannot win by non-military means, most importantly the strategic control of some of the largest oil reserves in the world. Since the peoples of the Middle East will not surrender their resources voluntarily, the US bourgeoisie must kill them in enormous numbers to get its way – a process so brutal that it requires a huge campaign of misrepresentation to make it acceptable to at least part of the masses in the US and its allied Western nations.<br /><br />It would probably go too far to claim that Snyder’s film is a conscious rallying cry for US warmongering in the Middle East, or that most of the audience who helped it earn nearly $456 million cared much about its reactionary politics. But the work is nonetheless the product of a particular ideological context. <i>300</i> is ancient history reinvented according to the most half-witted fantasies of the US bourgeoisie: reactionary in its admiration of a regressive society, repulsive in its homophobia and disabilism, racist in its portrayal of the Middle East, and pro-imperialist in its implicit support for US militarism.<br /><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes"><br />[1] The narrator actually refers at one point to ‘Asia’s endless hordes’.<br />[2] Peter Bradshaw, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/mar/23/actionandadventure.sciencefictionandfantasy">‘<i>300</i>’</a> (<i>Guardian</i>, 23 March 2007). Although Bradshaw is correct and amusing about the silliness of <i>300</i>, he recycles the usual stereotypes of Iranians as </span>‘<span class="footnotes">quick to quarrel</span>’<span class="footnotes"> and associated with holocaust denial, and denies any imperialist subtext to the film.</span><br /><span class="footnotes">[3] Samuel P. Huntington, <i>The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of the World Order</i> (1996). You can watch a lecture by Edward Said explaining and then demolishing Huntington <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6705627964658699201#">here</a>.</span><span class="footnotes"> </span><br /><span class="footnotes">[4] <a href="http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/612.php">Interview</a> on National Public Radio (NPR) on 24 January 2007. Islam emerged in the 7th century CE, not the 6th as Miller thinks. Genital mutilation is not unique to Muslim communities but is also practiced by Christians.</span><span class="footnotes"> </span><br /><span class="footnotes">[5] ‘Athens: the truth about democracy’, Channel 4, broadcast July 2007.</span><span class="footnotes"> </span><br /><span class="footnotes">[6] One gruesome episode came at the end of Athens’ failed attack on Syracuse, when the Syracusans packed 7000 Athenians into a stone quarry for ten weeks. Many died of disease and starvation before the remainder were sold into slavery.</span><br /><span class="footnotes">[7] Another means of terrorising the helots was the <i>Krypteia</i>, selected from the toughest young Spartan boys, who had leave every autumn to travel into Messenia and kill with impunity whomever they found: a kind of adolescent death squad.</span><span class="footnotes"> </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/ge-RXGMyS-s" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/ge-RXGMyS-s/is-this-sparta.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/08/is-this-sparta.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-8069518553310251480Wed, 29 Aug 2012 08:34:00 +00002014-12-17T10:58:35.870+00:00Ancient GreeceHomerLiteratureThersitesOne of the most interesting characters in the <i>Iliad</i> is neither a god nor a hero, and only appears for one altercation. Apart from Dolon, Thersites is the only named common soldier in the poem, and may be the first example in any literature of a political agitator. Marxists have traditionally taken a special interest in Thersites, and I shan’t disappoint.<br /><br />In Book 2, Agamemnon gathers his troops on the beach and tests their courage by pretending to give up the war against Troy. The soldiers, exhausted by nine years of war, immediately run for their ships. Spurred by the goddess Athena, Odysseus pursues them and turns their mood with his oratory. But one soldier remains uncowed. Thersites is ‘a blabbing soldier, who had an impudent way with officers’ [1] – the <i>Iliad</i>’s only social critic – and has the courage to stand up and challenge Agamemnon:<br /><br /><blockquote>‘Agamemnon!<br />What have you got to groan about? What more<br />can you gape after? Bronze fills all your huts,<br />bronze and the hottest girls – we hand them over<br />to you, you first, when any stronghold falls.<br />Or is it gold you lack? A Trojan father<br />will bring you gold in ransom for his boy –<br />though I – or some footsoldier like myself –<br />roped the prisoner in.<br />Or a new woman<br />to lie with, couple with, keep stowed away<br />for private use – is that your heart’s desire?<br />You send us back to bloody war for that?<br />Comrades! Are you women of Akhaia?<br />I say we pull away for home, and leave him<br />here on the beach to lay his captive girls!<br />Let him find out if we troops are dispensable<br />when he loses us! </blockquote><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--eLBkDK_xrI/TeguYnnDCzI/AAAAAAAAAn8/avtjQu-o1QQ/s1600/warrior-vase.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="Warrior vase" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--eLBkDK_xrI/TeguYnnDCzI/AAAAAAAAAn8/avtjQu-o1QQ/s320/warrior-vase.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613787936001821490" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 238px; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a><i>The ‘warrior vase’ found at Mycenae, dating from approximately 1200 BCE. The frieze on this krater, or mixing bowl, depicts rank and file warriors.</i><br /><br />Thersites’ analysis of the situation makes perfect sense. Why should the troops not leave the aristocrats to sort out their marital squabbles between themselves? The war was launched by the ruling class to resolve a dispute over Helen that has not the least relevance or interest to peasant farmers who should be safe at home working their land. It is little wonder that these farmers are sick of the nine years of war that have kept them from their families and maimed and killed their kind by the thousand. They won’t even win glory, because their role in combat is anonymous.<br /><br />With terse eloquence, Thersites is saying out loud what the great majority of the army has every right to be thinking. It is in this role as truth-sayer that he reappears in Shakespeare’s <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> – coarse in language, but exposing hypocrisy.<br /><br />Homer, however, makes it clear that he firmly disapproves. He describes Thersites at unusual length. His voice is described as ‘yapping’, ‘jeering’, ‘baiting’. In an absurd equation of physical deformity with deformity of spirit, he presents him as ‘the most obnoxious rogue who went to Troy. / Bowlegged, with one limping leg, and shoulders / rounded above his chest, he had a skull / quite conical, and mangy fuzz like mould.’ In an age of military heroes and Olympic athletes, it seems Thersites has done well to get into the army at all.<br /><br />An angry Odysseus immediately confronts Thersites:<br /><br /><blockquote>‘Better not raise your voice to your commanders,<br />or rail at them, after you lie awake<br />with nothing on your mind but shipping home…<br /><br />‘Here is my promise, and it will be kept:<br />if once again I hear your whining voice,<br />I hope Odysseus’ head my be knocked loose<br />from his own shoulders, hope I may no longer<br />be called the father of Telemakhos,<br />if I do not take hold of you and strip you –<br />yes, even of the shirt that hides your <dfn class="tooltip" title="Short tail, especially of hare, rabbit or deer – a reference to Thersites’ penis">scut</dfn>!<br />From this assembly ground I’ll drive you howling<br />and whip you like a dog into the ships!’</blockquote><br />The original Greek makes an explicit reference to exposing Thersites’ privates – usually softened simply to ‘nakedness’ by translators – as part of the threatened shaming.[2] Odysseus then beats Thersites on the body and shoulders with his staff until the man drops in tears, raising a ‘scarlet welt’ on his back. There’s nothing gracious about Odysseus’ behaviour, but for the aristocrats lauded and celebrated by the <i>Iliad</i>, this treatment is entirely proper. Earlier in Book 2 when Odysseus is rallying the departing army, we see a marked contrast between how he treats the common soldier and how he talks to members of the elite. To the men of rank, Odysseus explains Agememnon’s test and relies on persuasion: ‘It isn’t like you to desert the field / the way some coward would!’<br /><br /><blockquote>But when Odysseus met some common soldier<br />bawling still, he drove him back; he swung<br />upon him with his staff and told him:<br /><br />‘Fool,<br />go back, sit down, listen to better men –<br />unfit for soldiering as you are, weak sister,<br />counting for nothing in battle or in council!<br />Shall we all wield the power of kings? We can not,<br />and many masters are no good at all.<br />Let there be one commander, one authority,<br />holding his royal staff and precedence<br />from Zeus, the son of crooked-minded Kronos:<br />one to command the rest.’</blockquote><br />Odysseus’ tirade neatly illustrates Thersites’ sin – it is to have challenged the authority of the king and, by extension, the class system.<br /><br />Homer, who identifies with the class ideology of the nobles, does not allow the rank and file to agree with Thersites:<br /><br /><blockquote>The soldiers,<br />for all their irritation, fell to laughing<br />at the man’s disarray. You might have heard<br />one fellow, glancing at his neighbour, say:<br />‘Oh, what a clout! A thousand times Odysseus<br />has done good work, thinking out ways to fight<br />or showing you how to do it: this time, though,<br />he’s done the best deed of the war,<br />making that poisonous clown capsize.’</blockquote><br />Whatever the troops’ wariness about abusing the nobility, Thersites has expressed a view shared by many of his comrades. These are the troops who, a few lines earlier, gratefully surged towards their ships the moment they thought the war was over: ‘They cheered each other on to draw the ships into the sea; they cleared the channels in front of them; they began taking away the stays from underneath them, and the welkin rang with their glad cries, so eager were they to return.’ This is not the behaviour of men determined to serve their masters’ glory at all costs.<br /><br />Structurally, the episode illustrates how close the Greeks are to defeat at this point, which is early in the poem but late in the war (and makes all the more dramatic their eventual victory). Now an end to the war is dandled before the troops and then snatched away. No wonder then if Thersites berates Agamemnon, ‘at whom the troops were furious.’<br /><br />But Odysseus has saved the day, not least through his treatment of Thersites, which brings the ‘irritated’ men together against the scapegoat. The episode is partly intended to be comical, both for the reader/listener – Greek humour could be very cruel – and for the characters – their laughter at the ‘poisonous clown’ helping to restore the normal hierarchy of power. The Greek army rallies around its leaders, and after some speeches and a sacrifice to the gods, Homer gives us a long (and tedious) roll-call of the warriors and peoples participating in the campaign.<br /><br />The arrogant class attitude Homer reveals here was normal among the ancient Greek writers. G.E.M. de Ste Croix has pointed out that the ideological norm of the period was the poor ‘are not really fitted to rule and that this is much better left to their “betters”.’[3] Membership of the propertied class was an ‘essential qualification’ for rule. The Greek aristocracy was opposed to democracy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle included. It is one of the contradictions of ancient Greek society that the system that allowed philosophy to flower, by encouraging independent thought, was implacably opposed by the philosophers themselves.<br /><br />In taking issue with the warlike mood of aristocratic honour and due obedience that dominates the <i>Iliad</i>, Thersites actively challenges the dominant ideology of the day. Why, then, did Homer allow Thersites a voice at all?<br /><br />The poem’s gestation is so obscure that we are forced to speculate. One explanation may simply be that Thersites’ punishment serves as a warning to any listeners who might be feeling resentful of the ruling class. We should also remember that the <i>Iliad</i> was probably created from the contributions of many poets – it is possible that the episode is an interpolation by one of the more daring of them. Afterward, Thersites was permitted to remain as long as he was put firmly in his place. A more subtle possibility, observed by Rupert Graves and the critic Kenneth Burke, is that a great many members of the poem’s audience are struck by the sheer waste of life and resources portrayed in the war, and the oppressiveness of its class structure. Burke wrote: <br /><br /><blockquote>If an audience is likely to feel that it is being crowded into a position, if there is any likelihood that the requirements of dramatic ‘efficiency’ would lead to the blunt ignoring of a possible protest from at least some significant portion of the onlookers, <i>the author must get this objection stated in the work itself</i>. But the objection should be voiced in a way that the same breath disposes of it.[4]</blockquote><br />Homer has found a way to acknowledge an alternative voice, but by making Thersites ugly and ridiculous he distances himself from the seditious remarks.<br /><br />Ironically, a couple of centuries after the <i>Iliad</i> was written down, Greek democracy would allow a political voice to the common man (not woman). It came far too late to help poor cone-headed Thersites. But we may agree with Hegel that ‘the Thersites of Homer who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times.’[5]<br /><br /><hr /><span class="footnotes"><br />[1] All quotes in this article are from Book 2 of the <i>Iliad</i>. The translation is by Robert Fitzgerald (1974), my personal favourite.<br />[2] See John Miles Foley, <i>A Companion to Ancient Epic</i> (2005).<br />[3] G.E.M. de Ste Croix, <i>The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World</i> (1981).<br />[4] Kenneth Burke, <i>Language As Symbolic Action</i> (1966).<br />[5] Hegel, <i>Lectures on the Philosophy of History</i> (1837). </span><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/dskfYDrJUT8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/dskfYDrJUT8/thersites.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)2http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/08/thersites.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-6228782018279994313Tue, 21 Aug 2012 20:55:00 +00002013-12-13T14:28:59.447+00:00EdelmanevolutionGerald Edelman on consciousnessAnyone interested in the origins of art needs to study how human beings evolved their distinctive creative intelligence. One of the leading writers and researchers in the field of human consciousness and neuroscience is the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Gerald M. Edelman. In this article we shall take a very brief walk through his theory of consciousness and try to keep this incredibly complicated topic accessible to the general reader. <br /><br />Edelman’s goal is simply to answer the question: What is consciousness? “How can the firing of neurons give rise to subjective sensations, thoughts and emotions?... A scientific explanation must provide a causal account of the connection between these two domains”[1]. In the theory he calls ‘Neural Darwinism’, Edelman argues that consciousness – “what you lose when you fall into a deep dreamless sleep and what you regain when you wake up” – is a product of natural selection. His ideas emphasise the brain’s plasticity in response to the environment, and he rejects reductionism, metaphysics and wrong-headed analogies with computers.<br /><br /><b>Consciousness</b><br /><br />Consciousness is rooted in the operations of an individual body, above all the brain, and in its history and experiences. Importantly, “consciousness is a process, not a thing”, the “dynamic accomplishment of the distributed activities of populations of neurons in many different areas of the brain.” It is individual, continuous, intentional and unitary or integrated. At any given moment, <br /><br /><blockquote>The scene is not just wider than the sky, it can contain many disparate elements – sensations, perceptions, images, memories, thoughts, emotions, aches, pains, vague feelings, and so on. Looked at from the inside, consciousness seems continually to change, yet at each moment it is all of a piece.</blockquote><br />Human beings are conscious of being conscious. So we must make a distinction between ‘primary consciousness’ – the “state of being mentally aware of things in the world, of having mental images in the present”, which we have in common with many animals – and higher order consciousness – allowing “the recognition by a thinking subject of his or her own acts and affections”. The latter includes the ability to have intentions for the future and requires the use of symbols, which in its most advanced form means language capability. Besides ourselves, the only animals thought to possess higher order consciousness to a debateable degree are the higher primates.<br /><br />When conscious, individuals experience <b>qualia</b>. The term ‘quale’ refers to our particular experience of a property: such as redness, or warmth, or pain. Edelman describes qualia as “high order discriminations that constitute consciousness… experienced as parts of the unitary and integrated conscious scene”. All conscious events involve a complex of qualia – a quale cannot be experienced in isolation. <br /><br /><b>Neural basis of consciousness</b><br /><br />To develop a theory of consciousness we must first understand how the brain works. This is no easy matter, as the human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe and is still poorly understood. Its dominant feature is the <b>cerebral cortex</b>, a convoluted structure making up about two-thirds of the brain mass which lies over and around most of the brain. It contains 30 billion or more neurons (nerve cells) and a million billion synapses (connections), and most of the brain’s information processing takes place there. The cerebral cortex is divided into regions with different functions, e.g. areas involved in sight, hearing, touch, movement, and smell.<br /><br /><b>Neurons </b>are connected to each other to form a dense network to pass signals around the nervous system. They are very diverse, but a typical neuron has a long extension called an axon, which connects the neuron to other neurons at gaps called <b>synapses</b>. The synapse allows the neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. <br /><br />A region essential to consciousness is the <b>thalamus</b>, located at the centre of the brain and equivalent in size to a pair of walnuts. It serves to relay signals from the nerves (e.g. in your eyes, ears or skin) to the cerebral cortex, acting like a kind of central switchboard. For example, information from the retina of the eye is sent to a nucleus of the thalamus, which forwards it to the part of the cerebral cortex responsible for processing visual information. Another <dfn class="tooltip" title="below the cerebral cortex">subcortical</dfn> region is the <b>hippocampus</b>, important for short-term to long-term memory.<br /><br />The brain’s motor functions regulate not only movement but also assist the forming of images and concepts. The <b>primary motor cortex</b> sends signals down the spinal column to the muscles, and the <b>cerebellum</b>, a structure at the base of the brain, helps coordinate our physical actions. Located in the centre of the brain are the <b>basal ganglia</b>, which connect to the cortex via the thalamus. They are associated with voluntary movements and regulation of motor systems. <br /><br />Edelman concludes that there are three neuro-anatomical ‘motifs’ in our brains. The first is the thalamus and cortex. The second is the inhibitory circuits of the basal ganglia. The third are the ascending systems: nuclei of the brain stem that release neuromodulators such as serotonin and dopamine. <br /><br />We should not think simplistically of specific areas of the brain controlling specific functions. Certain activities tend to be region-specific, but the regions are connected up in a complex and integrated system. This integration is essential to consciousness. <br /><br /><b>The brain is not a computer</b><br /><br />Although he sometimes uses metaphors such as brain ‘circuitry’, Edelman makes a strong case against describing the brain as a computer. There is rich variation within the formation and movements of cells during the brain’s development, meaning no two brains are alike. The brain is not hard-wired, but develops patterns of neural activity, captured in the phrase ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. Although there are programmed stages of development, the behaviour of cells is always variable or plastic. “The result is a pattern of constancy and variation leading to highly individual networks in each animal.” This is no way to build a computer, which demands precise wiring and predictable programming. Inputs to the brain are not a sequence of ones and zeros – they are ambiguous. The computer analogy is too rigid to describe the organic, dynamic processes of the mind, which has to deal with a world that is unpredictable and is based on pattern recognition rather than logic. <br /><br />An example of this pattern recognition is the so-called ‘<b>binding problem</b>’, i.e. the question of how brains combine elements of complex patterns of information. When we see a red car drive past, there are separate processes to register colour, movement, orientation, and so on. A perception emerges in various contexts, and theory must find a mechanism to explain how it works. <br /><br />Another complication is <b>degeneracy</b>, which in this context means the ability of structurally different parts to perform similar functions under certain conditions, while performing different functions in other conditions. Again, this really doesn’t resemble a computer. <br /><br /><b>Neural Darwinism</b><br /><br />The brain evolved – it was not designed. Darwin argued that new organisms emerge from selection among the variant individuals in a population, based upon their fitness for survival within a particular environment. One of the tasks of neuroscience is to work out how precisely this process created the human brain. <br /><br />Just like any population of animals, brains show a huge amount of variation between individuals. Edelman sees this variation as fundamental: <br /><br /><blockquote>selection from such a population of variants could lead to patterns even under unpredictable circumstances, provided that some constraint of value or fitness was satisfied. In evolution, fitter individuals survive and have more progeny. In the individual brain, those synaptic populations that match value systems or rewards are more likely to survive or contribute more to the production of future behaviour.</blockquote><br />Edelman calls his selectionist theory the theory of neuronal group selection, or TNGS. This has three basic tenets. <br /><br /><b>Developmental selection</b>: selection creates a wide variety of brain ‘circuitry’ within individuals during their growth and development. No two people will have exactly the same synaptic structures in comparable areas of brain tissue – a bit like unique fingerprints.<br /><b>Experiential selection</b>: overlapping that first phase and after the major neuroanatomy is built, variations in environmental input continue to create variations in synaptic strengths, favouring some pathways and weakening others.<br /><b>Reentry</b>: ‘reentry’ is an interchange of signals that continuously relates parts of the brain to each other, relying on networks of connections between groups of neurons that have arisen out of the other two processes above. Reentry is not sequential but involves many paths acting simultaneously; it is the means by which bits of the brain communicate directly with each other. If a computer is organised by logic, a brain is organised by the process of reentry.<br /><br />The consequence of this process is the binding of neuronal groups with different functions into a coherent system. “How can it be,” asks Edelman, “that… up to thirty-three functionally segregated and widely distributed visual maps in the brain can nevertheless yield perception that coherently binds edges, orientations, colours, and movement into one perceptual image?” His answer is: through reentry. Degeneracy is also important, as it allows different neurons and neuronal groups to yield similar outputs despite their different structures. “Different cells can carry out the same function and the same cell can, at two different times, carry out different functions in different neuronal groups.” The TNGS means that we do not need any fixed, computer-like plan to explain what happens in consciousness. <br /><br />During natural selection, neuronal groups (rather than individual neurons) are selected for fitness from among the available variations.<br /><br /><b>Mechanisms of consciousness</b><br /><br />How do these workings of the brain give rise to consciousness? <br /><br />One of the most basic processes is the ability to categorise information from outside to make sense of the world. For example, we continually process various signals to categorise them as stable objects – chairs, cars, cats and so on. For Edelman, this categorisation is carried out by ‘<b>global mappings</b>’, i.e. sensory maps linked by reentry, and linked in turn to other systems such as the cerebellum and basal ganglia. Global mappings sample the world of signals and categorise them through the connections between neuronal groups. <br /><br />However, these signals could not help an animal learn without <b>memory</b>, which Edelman defines as “the capacity to repeat or suppress a specific mental or physical act”. Memory is essential to a theory of consciousness. <br /><br />Global mappings, concept formation and memory, along with the three neuro-anatomical ‘motifs’ of thalamus-cortex, subcortical organs and ascending value systems – these are the necessary evolutionary precursors of conscious activity. Then, Edelman argues, at some point in evolution, a new connectivity developed in the system. The critical development that allowed primary consciousness was the linking of memory to perceptual categorisation, granting an animal the ability to construct complex scenes and discriminate between elements of those scenes by referring to its memory of previous experience. This construction of a ‘remembered present’ improves the animal’s survival chances: it can make better choices about how to respond to its environment, for example by remembering that the last time it heard a particular growl, a predator appeared shortly after. <br /><br />Primary consciousness is experienced by many animals besides ourselves. Animals with only primary consciousness have no real sense of past or future or of a socially defined, named self, and they are not conscious of being conscious. This doesn’t mean they don’t <i>have </i>a self, or don’t have memory. The difference between them and us, according to the TNGS, is that they have no semantic abilities, i.e. “they are not able to use symbols as tokens to lend meaning to acts and events and to reason about events not unfolding in the present moment.” This doesn’t quite mean that language is necessary for higher order consciousness – some apes have semantic abilities, including the ability to use symbols, without their being able to talk. But our real reference for higher order consciousness is ourselves. At some point, we realised that an arbitrary token, such as a gesture or word, can stand for a thing or event. <br /><br /><blockquote>When a sufficiently large lexicon of such tokens is subsequently accumulated, higher-order consciousness can greatly expand in range. Associations can be made by metaphor, and with ongoing activity, early metaphor can be transformed into more precise categories of intrapersonal and interpersonal experience. The gift of narrative and an expanded sense of temporal succession then follow. While the remembered present is, in fact, a reflection of true physical time, a higher-order consciousness makes it possible to relate a socially constructed self to past recollections and future imaginations. The Heraclitean illusion of a point in the present moving from the past into the future is constructed by these means. This illusion, mixed with the sense of a narrative and metaphorical ability, elevates higher-order consciousness to new heights.</blockquote><br />We later evolved additional ‘circuitry’ – hand in hand with the evolution of the vocal tract, increase in brain size, bipedal posture and other developments – that made large-scale connections between conceptual systems, allowing symbolic communication and language, and for the higher order consciousness characteristic of the human mind. The heart of this was the <b>dynamic core</b>, a huge network of neurons that maintain a continual and integrated picture from a range of possibilities despite being constantly re-arranged; it is not a specific brain area but a constant <i>process</i>. Semantic and linguistic ability required new reentry pathways and circuits and greatly expanded the range of conscious thought. We could now invent narratives and fantasies. <br /><br />Because the reentrant circuitry of our minds is degenerate, Edelman doubts that there is a one-to-one correlation between a representation of an image or thought with any particular circuit or neurons. A neuron may help a representation one moment and not help at all the next. Representation is created by a complex network of neurons, synapses, environment, history and other contexts in which there are many ways to make the same meaning. <br /><br />There are no functional states that can be uniquely equated with defined or coded computational states in individual brains and no processes that can be equated with the execution of algorithms. Instead, there is an enormously rich set of selectional repertoires of neuronal groups whose degenerate responses can, by selection, accommodate the open-ended richness of environmental input, individual history, and individual variation.<br /><br />Just as every organism has a unique biological identity, each consciousness has a unique history. <br /><br /><b>Conclusion</b><br /><br />To summarise: Consciousness is rooted in the brain, but the brain is embedded both in a body and in an environment. Consciousness is unitary, while at the same time it shifts and changes. Our earliest interactions with the world involve information from motor areas and emotional responses, and therefore create a self which acts as a reference for memory. In primary consciousness, this self exists in a ‘remembered present’ constructed around an integrated scene over a short time period. Even an animal with only primary consciousness and very little understanding of past and future can make many conscious discriminations between states, experienced as qualia. Primary consciousness depends on parallel, recursive activity within and between areas of the thalamus and the cortex.<br /><br />With the evolution of higher order consciousness based on semantic ability, concepts of self, past and future emerge. Human beings have a self acting in a remembered present, but also a defined self; we are conscious of being conscious, have awareness of the past and can imagine the future. We have language, i.e. not only semantic ability but full syntactic ability as well. We can use symbols to divorce ourselves from the remembered present by acts of attention. <br /><br />Neuroscience is still in its infancy. Scientists dispute whether there is any need to introduce Darwinism into the connecting of neurons, and Edelman does not give enough emphasis to consciousness as belonging to <i>active people</i> rather than brain processes. But Edelman’s account, with its correct emphasis on the mind as dynamic, plastic and organic rather than rigid or machine-like, may yet prove seminal for our understanding of consciousness.<br /><br /><hr />[1] Quotes are from Edelman’s succinct and relatively accessible book <i>Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness</i> (2004).<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/2k8DEjs1DhY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/2k8DEjs1DhY/gerald-edelman-on-consciousness.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/08/gerald-edelman-on-consciousness.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-6432429725107804644Sat, 18 Aug 2012 13:57:00 +00002012-08-18T14:58:42.154+01:00RacismAfrocentrism<blockquote>&ldquo;It should go without saying, but I&rsquo;ll say it anyway: all of the significant evolution in our species occurred in populations with brown and black skins living in Africa. At the beginning of hominid evolution five million years ago, our ape-like ancestors had dark skin just like chimpanzees and gorillas. When modern <i>Homo sapiens</i> evolved a hundred thousand years ago, we still had dark skins. When brain sizes tripled, they tripled in Africans. When sexual choice shaped human nature, it shaped Africans. When language, music and art evolved, they evolved in Africans. Lighter skins evolved in some European and Asian populations long after the human mind evolved its present capacities.<br /><br />&ldquo;The skin colour of our ancestors does not have much scientific importance. But it does have a political importance, given the persistence of anti-black racism. I think that a powerful antidote to such racism is the realisation that the human mind is a product of black African females favouring intelligence, kindness, creativity, and articulate language in black African males, and vice versa. Afrocentrism is an appropriate attitude to take when we are thinking about human evolution.&rdquo;</blockquote><br />From Geoffrey Miller, <i>The Mating Mind</i> (2000).<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/_nIwvxvxunk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/_nIwvxvxunk/afrocentrism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/08/afrocentrism.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-3263957819832362638Sat, 02 Jun 2012 11:23:00 +00002012-06-05T00:13:45.663+01:00MusicPunkNo future<iframe width="480" height="360" alt="The Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8z2M_hpoPwk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/TekxuIH2Wgw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/TekxuIH2Wgw/no-future.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2012/06/no-future.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-6934605690919449377Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:56:00 +00002012-05-11T20:23:28.829+01:00Steven RoseSteven Rose: Can genetics explain human nature?A 45-minute talk [1] by Steven Rose which sets out a persuasive and progressive approach to the dialectics of genetics and culture. He argues:<br /><br /><blockquote>&ldquo;To argue that we are determined by our genes, without actually understanding that our genes are meaningless except in the context of the cells in which they are embedded, the bodies in which those cells exist, the societies in which those bodies actually grow up, and the ways in which we transform continuously those societies as we grow and change the world around us, is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of what it is to be the bio-social organism that we are.&rdquo;<br /></blockquote><br /><iframe alt="part 1" width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/DswL_7dnI4A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe alt="part 2" width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/s7-I8ba1wLE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe alt="part 3" width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/c9ZAzeneo2Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe alt="part 4" width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/V3RHGT2ImlU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><iframe alt="part 5" width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/K6E_Oniy0vc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><hr>[1] The <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Bigmartinno1">person</a> who posted this on YouTube has not written when or where it was recorded.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/00Mp-imc7Z8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/00Mp-imc7Z8/steven-rose-can-genetics-explain-human.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/10/steven-rose-can-genetics-explain-human.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-2266594562363287250Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:39:00 +00002011-10-03T13:03:22.778+01:00Alva NoëAlva Noë – we are not our brains<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/af3Vq-C1ck8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />A video of an excellent talk by by the philosopher Alva Noë, in which he argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to our brains but arises out of a wider engagement with our environment.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/D_-xRnK5M-c" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/D_-xRnK5M-c/alva-noe-we-are-not-our-brains.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/09/alva-noe-we-are-not-our-brains.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-1374518684371032226Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:14:00 +00002013-02-25T11:02:30.169+00:00MusicSongs of struggleIn case readers think I have been idle, I have opened a YouTube account and created two playlists named ‘Songs of Struggle’, parts 1 and 2. These are songs with which the workers’ movement can identify.<br /><br />Visit my <a href="http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCjylEdycLjTrhu4j9DKHVA/videos?flow=grid&view=1">channel</a> and take a look.<br /><br />Or go direct:<br /><br />Playlist one is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKncOT6AZOLOUTRenHA1GvQbdix-A8UwR">here</a>.<br />Playlist two is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKncOT6AZOLNVtRCNx6OlTwO0qK3mgJZr">here</a>.<br /><br />Obviously there are countless other singers and songs which could have been included – Victor Jara, Billy Bragg, etc – so perhaps I’ll create further playlists in the future. I’m open to suggestions.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/A9UjthjmLwc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/A9UjthjmLwc/songs-of-struggle.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)0http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/09/songs-of-struggle.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689969130227503588.post-9181923691793583493Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:49:00 +00002011-08-13T14:06:21.206+01:00England riotsOn the riots in EnglandCarlos Latuff&rsquo;s comment on the riots:
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wubBMXghrvg/TkZzOQ2YDGI/AAAAAAAAAoQ/7nDuov0Mq3U/s1600/latuff-on-riots.gif"><img style="margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 326px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wubBMXghrvg/TkZzOQ2YDGI/AAAAAAAAAoQ/7nDuov0Mq3U/s400/latuff-on-riots.gif" border="0" alt="Carlos Latuff" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_56403222722http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif06523490" /></a>
<br />Originally posted <a href="http://twitpic.com/634ca8">on his Twitpic account</a>.
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<br />And one from Martin Rowson:
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NZIDvmYjVzc/TkZ2ZnZW_dI/AAAAAAAAAoY/rzIBZxjlqwk/s1600/martin-rowson-on-riots.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 302px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NZIDvmYjVzc/TkZ2ZnZW_dI/AAAAAAAAAoY/rzIBZxjlqwk/s400/martin-rowson-on-riots.jpg" border="0" alt="Martin Rowson" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5640325765772279250" /></a>
<br />From his <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cartoon/2011/aug/13/david-cameron-big-broken-society-cartoon">page</a> at the Guardian website.
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<br />As for how to interpret the rioting, I side with Russell Brand&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/london-riots-davidcameron?CMP=NECNETTXT8187">piece in the <em>Guardian</em></a>:
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<br /><blockquote>However &ldquo;unacceptable&rdquo; and &ldquo;unjustifiable&rdquo; it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can&rsquo;t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.
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<br />Unless on the news tomorrow it&rsquo;s revealed that there&rsquo;s been a freaky &ldquo;criminal creating&rdquo; chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that&rsquo;s causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol&rsquo; brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn&rsquo;t – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.
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<br />...[A] state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can&rsquo;t afford what&rsquo;s in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.
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<br />I remember Cameron saying &ldquo;hug a hoodie&rdquo; but I haven&rsquo;t seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don&rsquo;t vote, they&rsquo;ve realised it&rsquo;s pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the &ldquo;we don&rsquo;t give a toss about you&rdquo; party.
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<br />Politicians don&rsquo;t represent the interests of people who don&rsquo;t vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected...
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<br />Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, &ldquo;mindlessly&rdquo;, motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that&rsquo;s why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.
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<br />These young people have no sense of community because they haven&rsquo;t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron&rsquo;s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there&rsquo;s no such thing.
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<br />If we don&rsquo;t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don&rsquo;t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.
<br /></blockquote><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~4/XRgGSp1--zw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Marxist-Theory-Of-Art/~3/XRgGSp1--zw/on-riots-in-england.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld)1http://marxist-theory-of-art.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-riots-in-england.html